America in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is known as an increasingly litigious society in which trials and verdicts are covered in news and gossip and via books by the participants, guilty or innocent. This coverage enshrines the lawyer celebrity who, while present in films, has been a particular staple of television drama.

If Dragnet is the type specimen for police shows, Perry Mason (CBS, 1957–66) is the type specimen for lawyers. Raymond Burr, who had appeared as a burly killer in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), became an invincible lawyer whose clients, persecuted by the police, were invariably innocent. In a weekly morality play that has survived decades more in reruns, Perry, his sidekick private eye and love-struck secretary skated on the edges of the law in order to find the truth, while others confessed to adultery fraud, greed and ultimately the murder. Prosecutors lost although justice was served.

Mason’s heroics questioned the efficiency if not the motives of police (although Burr later played a wheelchair-bound cop in Ironside), setting the stage for important dramas discussing major issues like The Defenders (CBS, 1961–5) and many lesser shows. Yet, if these could tap into 1960s suspicion of police and government, lawyers, too, were found to be more human and more diverse than the white male heroes who created the genre.

L.A. Law (NBC, 1986–94), a widely watched ensemble show of the 1980s, for example, jumbled office politics, courtrooms and bedrooms. In the 1990s, David Kelley’s The Practice (ABC, 1997–) makes ethical issues central to a sometimes shady firm and beleaguered District Attorney’s office, while Ally McBeal (FOX, 1997–)—the first hit show named after a female lawyer—treats law as a career/lifestyle rather than a crusade for justice. Again, human vulnerability and moral ambiguity are seen as essences of the law rather than as external hindrances: justice is one goal among many. Law and Order (NBC, 1990–) offers perhaps the most clear-cut moral universe, with its concentration on prosecutors making deals and losing cases).

The fictional narratives of crime and punishment of the 1990s, however, intersect with other media realities equally vulnerable and ambiguous. Extensive coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial and presidential scandals, as well as wider access to C-Span and Court TV, have made the uncertainties of real justice part of everyday life. “Courttainment” in which “real” judges (Judge Wappner, former New York City mayor Ed Koch, Judge “Judy”) decide real civil cases with sitcom spiels also blurring the structures of authority and truth that seemed so clear decades before.

Just as crime and punishment have been crucibles of social change and cultural meanings, whether on-screen or off-screen, the integration of women and minorities as major characters in police and law dramas (judges, lawyers and detectives, as well as criminals), the growing violence of stories and depictions, and the humanization of lawyers have all reflected changing attitudes and prepared these changes.