I am going to resist making any one of many possible puns using the name of the new ABC Television series, The Deep End, in telling you how bad it is – let's just suffice it to say this show isn't very good and will hopefully fade away right quick.
This prime time soap follows five young and attractive first-year lawyers being chucked into the deep end of the legal world at the prestigious Los Angeles law firm Sterling, Huddle, Oppenheim & Craft. Although there is certainly a lot of drama between the partners, whose last names make up the firm's name, the show mainly focuses on the youngsters, Dylan Hewitt, Liam Priory, Addy Fischer, Beth Branford and Malcolm Bennet.
Matt Long plays the sensitive Dylan, Ben Lawson plays Liam, an Aussie whore with a heart of gold, Tina Majorino is the somewhat geeky and overwhelmed Addy, Leah Pipes plays the bred-for-success blond with daddy issues, Beth, and Mehcad Brooks is the strong, complex token minority, Malcom.
Okay, I guess Nicole Ari Parker, as Susan Oppenheim, is black and Billy Zane, as Cliff Huddle, could pass as some sort of minority with the tan he is sporting, but still it is generally a show without a lot of diversity.
What there is in this show is a lot of inter(office)course. This is basically the kind of law firm where you would half expect orgies to breakout on the weekends. Dylan pines for a paralegal, who just so happens to be breaking off a sexual relationship with one of the partners, Dylan's boss, who is also married to another high-profile lawyer at the firm. Meanwhile Liam is macking on Beth and Addy has a thing for Malcom's strong silent type.
Someone needs to tell ABC that they need to stop making Grey's Anatomy clones. They already have two Grey's franchises with the original and the spin-off Private Practice -- time for some new ideas.
The Deep End, with its overcooked melodrama and jokes that fall so far flat you are forced to chuckle at how pitiful they are, is a pretty poor knock off.
The show officially solidifies its lame status in episode three when Beth and Addy are assigned to a case defending a high-profile client, a lingerie designer, from a sexual harassment charge. The ladies win the case for their client but feel dirty about it when they realize their client may not be guilty in this particular instance but does systematically discriminate against women at his company.
Tough luck, right? Lawyers defend bad people all the time, that is the way it goes. Even habitual sexual harassers deserve proper legal representation.
What came next was just amusing. Beth and Addy reveal their moral dilemma to their boss and the high-powered superwoman partner Susan Oppenheim (Parker) gets involved. Susan sets an appointment with the client and goes off on him for womanizing and the sexual harassment in his company. After the client is put in his place Beth, Addy and Susan triumphantly march out of the office giving each other high-fives.
Besides being a really lame way to trumpet female-empowerment, it flies in the face of everything that had happened on the show in the first three episodes.
First of all, the lingerie story line was used as an excuse to show as many women in lingerie as possible. Secondly, the law firm that these characters work at seems like the perfect place to work if you want to be sexually harassed.
It is tone deaf writing like that which makes this show a turkey. Stay away and do not let yourself get hooked on this completely unoriginal drama.
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