As Seen On TV

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

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21 Responses

  1. Doctor Jay says:

    Watching Jamie Casino’s ad (can that possibly be his real name?) steels my resolve to never, ever let Casino within a million miles of my legal affairs. Am I the only one?Report

  2. Mike Schilling says:

    I’m certainly confused. Which video game blames passengers for car rollovers?Report

  3. Mike Schilling says:

    Many, many years ago, before Letterman moved to CBS, they had no late night talk show at 11:30. Instead, they had a set of cop/lawyer/detective shows, one for each day of the week, which they called “Crime time, after prime time”. (Honestly, I am not making this up.) Friday night’s was called Dark Justice. It was about a judge whose family had been killed by a bomb meant for him. During the day he had to let criminals, many as bad as the ones who’d murdered his wife and child, walk because of stinking technicalities. At night he would get his gang together and track them down. It was every bit as bad as it sounds, and I used to watch it every week.

    Jamie Casino’s ad brought that all back.Report

    • Glyph in reply to Mike Schilling says:

      This sounds like a cross between Dexter and the McBain/Mendoza movies.

      In other words, AMAZING.Report

    • Did it have flaming hammers?

      There was a comic book about a guy who was a judge and a vigilante. He killed himself in the final issue because killing murderers was his job.Report

      • I didn’t say what it was called.

        Besides, it was spoiled for me and still awesome.Report

      • greginak in reply to Will Truman says:

        The Spoilers will be a new science based crime fighting series on CBS featuring a take no non-sense forceful leader, hot chick with low cut blouses, a young handsome guy and a nerd. They will investigate crimes based on Internet rumors and chat rooms.Report

      • Mike Schilling in reply to Will Truman says:

        No hammers. The most stylish thing it had was that the judge looked very buttoned-down and conservative in the courtroom. At night, he would take off his short-hair wig, shake out his shoulder-length locks. and get down to business.

        But this was broadcast TV, so it wasn’t as noir as you’re probably imagining. The goal each week was to pull a scam on the bad guy and get enough evidence to put him away for good. (He was a gangster or some kind of career criminal, so he’d be committing new crimes he hadn’t been tried for yet.) He did usually wind up dead, but because of his own recklessness or some unforeseeable accident, not because they judge killed him. I don’t even recall the common Burn Notice strategy of setting the bad guy up to be killed by his own people.Report

    • I remember “Crime Time After Prime Time!”

      As I recall, it was before the days of the internet and skinemax, and part of the appeal of shows like Silk Stockings and Forever Knight was how they always found ways of having buxom women dressed in bikinis and lingerie throughout the show.Report

      • Mike Schilling in reply to Tod Kelly says:

        Ah, Silk Stalkings starring Mitzi Kapture. A gorgeous, gorgeous woman, and the least convincing person ever to pretend to be a police. Like, less plausible than your 8-year-old playing cops and robbers.

        IMDB says the she was eventually replaced by Janet Gunn, a pretty blonde who was part of the Dark Justice gang as private eye Kelly Cochrane. Compared to her, Kapture was Alec Guinness. I remember a scene where she told the judge “I’ll see what the word is on the street”, and I honestly didn’t believe she knew what a street was.Report

  4. LeeEsq says:

    Legal ads are a strange beast. For decades, lawyers weren’t allowed to advertise at all. It was seen as a violation of the rules of professional conduct. It was part of our legal inheritance from England, where a lot of the business of lawyering was designed so lawyers of gentle birth wouldn’t have to recognize that they were nothing more than common tradesman. White Protestant lawyers also found it a useful cudgel to prevent undesirable types, Ethnic Whites, from practicing law. Than the Supreme Court ruled that this violated the First Amendment to the Constitution around 1980.

    Lawyers were allowed to advertise but a lot of restrictions were placed in lawyer advertisements compared to others. Some of the restrictions are common-sensical like not guaranteeing results. Others are kind of strange like lawyer ads have to openly state that they are advertisements or that actors playing lawyers in the ad must be identified as such because non-lawyers are apparently going to be to dumb to recognize that an advertisement is that.Report

  5. Road Scholar says:

    That’s an awesome commercial but it would leave me confused if I ran across it channel surfing at the top of the hour and it wasn’t the lead in for some kind of vigilante-lawyer series. Serious production values for a lawyer ad.

    Don’t know if I’d hire him. Either I couldn’t afford him because he’s really, seriously that good, or he’s totally full of shit.Report

  6. Doctor Jay says:

    2. Emma, also Jane AustenReport

  7. gingergene says:

    I actually saw this ad in real time, at a Super Bowl party in Savannah. It was incredible, literally. No one could figure out if this was real or some kind of parody. Was it a commerical or a short movie? Was it a promo for some new bad-lawyer-makes-good TV show? Ok, there’s the local fishwrap with the police chief, Willie Lovett, on it, so it’s not a national thing. A minute and half in, still going- is this a commercial? What kind of commerical is 2 minutes long? During the Super Bowl? Who can afford that?

    There was a lot of discussion in the following days about whether this was just an awesome, egocentric waste of money or a black eye for the Hostess City. (5 Million+ views on YouTube, though most of those, for geographical reasons, are not people who would be able to retain Mr. Casino’s services.)

    That said, the ad was far more entertaining than the game was.Report