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Courtrooms are a bit like outer space: strange, anodyne places where most of the laws of physics you’re used to on Earth do not apply. In court, no one talks the way they do in most other contexts. You’re at the mercy of fickle forces beyond your control. And the chairs you sit in to navigate it all look really uncomfortable. As decades of Star Trek shows have shown, TV writers can tell all sorts of stories about exploring outer space that are really not-so-secretly about the world around us. Star Trek writers frequently pivot to any flavor of TV that suits them: perhaps a mystery or Western one week, maybe a war story or hostage crisis the next, followed by an episode just really settling down into some hardcore diplomacy.
Legal dramas, meanwhile, explore the conflicts of modern society with a plainness that can make them easy to overlook. Distilling a conflict into a battle of courtroom oratory is absolute catnip for the dramatists and…
