What it felt like back then.
The temper of the times for a particular decade can be described by the social upheavals that mark the decade. The Thirties were the Depression; the Forties were theWar and its reconstruction; the Fifties were the affluent society and the civil rights movement, and so on and so on, with each decade having its characteristic sociological events. It is difficult to characterize decades with their cultural emanations in that culture is unevenly produced. The Thirties was sparse on novels though it did produce memorable films and popular music. The Forties had an outpouring of drama, both Miller and Williams doing their best work. The Fifties included novelists and writers such as Bellow and the immigres Nabakov and Arendt, which did give a sense of the deeper meanings of the decade. But it is also possible to speak of what we might call “the taste of the times'' referring to the felt rather than the deeper meanings of a time, what is experienced and readily available, even as that quickly passes and so has to be recovered or exposed from memory as the way it was, never mind the deeper currents. I am reminded of this more restricted focus by having looked at the first season of “LA Law” a network tv series originally aired in the Eighties, which does not seem so long ago but which the usual process of cultural amnesia has abolished until it was made available this fall on Hulu streaming, a service that did not exist when “LA Law'' first aired. Think of those episodes as a way to recover Eighties fads and preoccupations even if current cultural commentators recently offered in the New York Times find the series quaint or distasteful rather than engaging the truths of the times they told.
The most striking aspect of the differences between “LA Law'' and now is how differently people dressed. Women wore ruffles and flounces and colorful blouses and carefully coiffed their hair while men had suits with a variety of colors and textures and longish hair. That is not as extreme as the Seventies where the men had leisure suits and platform heels but dress was more dressed up than is the case today where both sexes have drab clothes and straight short hair. That stands out more than the fact that people use pay phones and cradled phones and use real cardboard files to enclose their documents rather than use digital ones. How did people manage to do business without computers? Somehow they did, moving cartons of documents from one place to another and having to review those documents by observation rather than by selecting which documents to read by selecting keywords. But people did go to hotels and restaurants and engage in romantic dalliance though I detect the second or third blush of the sexual revolution in that women are pointedly free to toy with men and long before the supposedly more enlightened age of “#Metoo” where a woman is always to be believed but, rather, everyone is fair game. Both men and women are predatory. One of the main female figures points out she is no prude and wants to repeat a named but unspecified sexual practice. Maybe exaggeration is a way to show just how liberated both sexes had become and more was on the way rather than what did happen, which is that sexual matters became more sedate. “LA Law'' emphasizes the sleazy side of life, people a bit adventurous in their sexual dealings.
Because, in the brief period of a decade, the appearances of a time can seem like fads, akin to hula hoops and Dav’y Crocket hats, and therefore no more to be taken seriously than the brightly colored blouses, viewers can neglect the presence in the moment of what is an evolution in social structure. After all, every moment or decade is on the cusp of becoming something else. That happens in “LA Law'' and applies not only to clothing and courtship fashions. It also applies to the unfolding rearrangements of gender and racial groups. There are many women in the law firm at “LA Law'' but aggressive female negotiators are called “dykes” when an opposing male counsel gets testy. That hasn’t changed in that Chris Christie was recently praised for chiding the other men on the debate panel for dumping on Nikki Haley lest she have to present herself as too aggressive for a woman when it would have been better for her to defend herself rather than let a man do the gallant thing. Halley, after all, is running for President. It is taking a long time to have sexual equality get unraveled.
“LA Law” also highlights its regard as progressive on gay rights. An early episode shows a cross dresser, a man dressed as a woman, who had been the companion of a recently deceased male law partner. She looks clearly off-putting, heavily made up as if a Goth type and some of the partners think that disquieting and one of them is outraged to find that most of the dead man’s estate is left to his partner. The episode portrays the story as the crossdresser having been beleaguered and looking forward to more enlightened times with regard to gender bending. The idea is that the show presents a way to go forwards while acknowledging that the present situation is unpleasant. Later on, there is an episode of a gay man who kills his gay lover so as to save him from the further ravages of AIDS, which at that time was invariably fatal and gruesome in its decline. So the series sympathizes with gays but seems quaint has long past because diseases come and go without major cultural effects. Today, AIDS is managed with a few pills and the recent Covid epidemic, which took one million lives, is now in the past, myself just reminded to get a yearly Covid shot along with my yearly flu shot. Pandemics don’t last once they are controlled, the main counterexample being the Black Plague, which may have ended feudalism. Older technologies that led to deaths lose interest when the precipitating cause abates. It is plausible that in the Wilkie Collins novel “No Name” a father is lost to a train explosion, a tragedy rather than comic exaggeration of tragedy. While we have car wrecks in large numbers, these are tragedies rather than the flukes that will happen when there are driverless cars.
The series also confronts the unfolding history of race relations. Black and brown lawyers are solicited by the “LA Law” law firm but the road is rocky because they wonder whether they have been placed in opposition one to the other. Appealing Black women are victimized and chunky or scarred Black men seen as hoodlums. There is an episode when a Black woman defends herself from a police intrusion that results in the death of her child which is reminiscent of what happened forty years later concerning the death killing of Briana Taylor which suggests that police killings of innocent Black citizens remains a problem and so built into the social structure rather than a fad or a step along the way of progress.
Some episodes in “LA Law” cover issues that continue to recur, just like police violence against Blacks, and so are a marker of something in the social structure. One episode considers a case when a pharmaceutical company did not properly label what drugs not to take while also using an over the counter remedy and a number of people died from the drug interaction. Fast forward to the Sentanol drug produced by big pharma that was supposedly for pain relief but created widespread drug addiction. New drugs on the market are always a risk and to be tightly controlled, even as older technologies that led to deaths have now abated. Another transitory event in “LA Law” that digs deep is the extent to which women at the time have to start managing their own finances. One secretary insists on a raise despite her emotional dependency on her boss, which is an advance but not entirely different from a decade before when Mary Tyler Moore argued a raise on her merits rather than because a man needed more money than she did so he could support his family. On the other hand, a lasting image in “LA Law” is that a shorter man has a fling and then a longer relationship with a much taller woman, which still seems an unlikely pair, as was shown in the movie about Julia Child, who married a shorter man.
A theme of some episodes of “LA Law” concerns efficiency experts who are posed as the opponents of more traditional and reliable legal methods. A mega firm that might absorb the “LA law” law firm is troubled and rejected by outside consultants who want to install cubicles around their desks and otherwise increase productivity while the partners insist on individually crafted lawyering. In another episode, an expert on jury selection advises on how to clothe their lawyers and the lawyers should use pre-packaged summations. The experts are bested in moot court by having one of their brilliant associates do their own thing. Those two episodes aren’t just a way to provide elements of dramatic conflict. It is more serious than that, a part of ongoing social structure. People have resented efficiency experts ever since they arose with Taylorism in the early Twentieth Century with time study measurements of how workers did their labor, but that resentment may be as old as the arrival of quantification at the end of the Eighteenth Century. People still prefer their seat of the pants judgments to what data people offer as statistical findings. “LA Law” is retrograde rather than progressive in this respect . I wonder how “LA Law” would deal with technology in this age of Artificial Intelligence.
It can be said of “LA Law” that the themes of the series are sleazy and titillating and so regarded as the properties of the artist, and so specific to its creation, while I am arguing that the facts uncovered from the series are evidence of the social world of which they are a part. Rather than think of the series as only located in its fiction and opposed to themes available in other television series, consider another popular Eighties tv series where a viewer can recover additional facts from that decade aside from what are its own particular themes, those part of standard literary tropes and its particular creation, by exhibiting what is conveyed about the reality of social life as it was.
A good example is the well regarded network series “Moonlighting”, also from the Eighties, where the byplay between Bruce Willis and Sybil Shepard is charming. This series is just a spoof of detective shows, a comment on the genre, rather than a window into life, which “LA Law” makes more to claim: lawyers frantic and troubled, sleazy defendants and personal lives, LA a city making visible the nature of contemporaneous life. “Moonlighting” has stereotypical and exaggerated villains who are the super villains from “Batman”. But even that literary creation reveals some true facts found also from “LA Law”. Most of the villains wear tailored suits with the exception of a crazed person with a mohawk hairdo and a lot of pimples. The women are coiffed. And the basic premise of the comedy-drama is that a woman who had a lot of money loses it all to a bad investment firm and has to find a living, which means in this series. going in on a detective bureau she had originally bought to lose money for a tax writeoff. Women, in this decade, presume themselves to have to support themselves rather than do the old fashioned thing and marry a sugar daddy, which is what an Edith Wharton woman would have done. The heroine has apparently been escorted by rich and older duds; it would now be unacceptable to marry one of them and instead engage in a madcap financial adventure. That is a sort of liberation occurring in this decade and in this series.
Let it be noted that I have not at all referred to major political, economic and international events that took place during the Eighties and stood out as more significant then and now as the foibles and fads of the decade. The Eighties are a period of Republican Presidential rule that restricted unionization and lowered taxes for the wealthy while presenting themselves as responsible stewards of the American enterprise and that did achieve the end of the Cold War, the USSR capitulating to US outspending, a deteriorating Soviet economy and agile diplomacy. These results last, however much Republicans went farther Right with people like Newt Gingrich and eclipsed Reagan’s Rightist views however much he had positioned himself as a right wing figure. A focus on social structure, however, is to put aside the taste of a time as conveying the experiences of the time, actual changes in social structure just a part of its experience, that understood as the quality of the time, more like a fashionable suit rather than a reliable function. Tastes give zoot suits and a lot of makeup while social structures remain invisible and hardy. These two Eighties tv series leave you without weighty themes or archetypes, only the flavor of their times, and so don't rank as literature, but they are part of history.