Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Lawyers Not In Love, The Defenders And Sixties Tv, Steven Classen

Faculty Publications - Department of Communication and Cinematic Arts

This essay offers a social history and examination of The Defenders as a popular, criti- cally acclaimed television text that negotiated anxieties regarding crime, law, justice, lib- eralism, and masculinity in the 1960s and 1990s. Both The Defenders television series (1961–1965) and the Showtime motion picture series (1997–1998) by the same name rearticulated enduring tensions between law’s formalism and just desires for compassion and mercy, depicting defense attorneys as men who work both inside and outside of “law” to ensure justice and confront the lack of humanism in “the rule of law.” Such discourses are understood and appreciated in different …