The Intolerable Cruelty of Kevin Hill
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2004 10:32 PM
I want to like Kevin Hill. I do. I thought the show was funny and surprisingly devoid of filler, but that might be because first episodes have to be about rapid exposition. I liked that 50 things happened and half of them were life altering. I felt like it was a filling television experience.

But, and you know there had to be a "but," the show killed me on the law. Killed me. It was Intolerable Cruelty all over again. In case you missed it, that was a Coen brothers film starring George Clooney, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Cedric the Entertainer. Not even my undying love for the Coen boys or the fact that every time Cedric was onscreen yelling "I'm gonna nail your ass! I'm gonna nail your ass!" I nearly died laughing could overcome the pain caused by watching the realities of community property law shoved aside for the glamour of common community property misunderstanding. I'm sure the Coens knew better. I'm sure everyone involved knew better, but you can't hang the plot of your movie on a fundamentally flawed premise. That is, the second you marry some rich person in a community property state, you get half their money. That's what people often think getting half of your stuff means and it seems awfully unfair. Well, yeah, it's so unfair that it's not the way it works. It works like this. I couldn't contain my freaking out watching them make the movie interesting by getting the law as wrong as possible. (I'll admit knowing the real way makes me sensitive to this, but it was too much.)

Okay, so how does this pertain to Kevin Hill? Well, in the show, they made mistakes that you don't have to be a lawyer to find fishy. The case in the premiere included a case where a star athlete being sued by a woman who alleged he sexually assaulted her. No relation to Kobe , I'm sure, just like next week Gina Gershon's turn as a boozy, addicted rock star who might lose her kid bears only a coincidental resemblance to Courtney Love. Anyway, Kevin's firm that unceremoniously lightened his workload for him, causing him to abruptly quit (and Kevin's sure prone to these fits of abrupt action), represented the guy. His new gynocentric firm (made up of three women attorneys and designed to let the single mom head attorney have time to raise her kid) represents the victim. The problem-um, wouldn't his old firm and the athlete complain that because Kevin knows all about their side of the case and would be able to share all this confidential information with the other party? Never came up.

The second issue was that at the trial Kevin tried to bring up some woman that the athlete had apparently previously sexually assaulted, except there was no police report, just a medical report and her story. The opposing counsel was only in a huff because he thought Kevin's trying to call her as a surprise witness. Unless the state has some crazy rules, in a civil case you can't use prior bad acts to prove conduct, that is, you can't say that, well, he did it to this other girl once so he also totally did it this time. "Prior acts of sexual misconduct may be used against a criminal defendant charged with a sexual offense" but "[c]haracter evidence is never admissible in a civil case except in cases of malicious prosecution, libel and slander since reputation is relevant to the cause of action" (as html). So maybe, that's what the defense lawyers should have been mad about? Maybe the lesson was Kevin's old firm really, really sucked. I guess when I think about it that way, I can like the show. I'll just have to see how it goes next week.

Random other issues: It was weird that Kevin seemed to have been hired on the spot by the new firm though he hadn't bothered to research it because he knew nothing about them. O . . . kaaaay. And the redhead lawyer who acts all spazy and then comes in like a shark is weird. She seemed less a great negotiator than good at baseless ultimatums, which works, but I didn't really get that. And the block woman has no personality yet except that she doesn't like Kevin, which I guess is a personality. The most interesting thing of all: Two Homicide refugees in Michael Michelle and Jon Seda. Though mentally I associate Michelle more with ER and Seda with, forgive me, Selena.

comments? e-mail me.