Why Aren't There More Lawyers in Space?

Source: Paramount Plus

In 2023, the second season of the Star Trek show Strange New Worlds, the prequel spin-off to the original series, had a legal episode where the civil rights attorney Neera defended the genetic modifications of Lt Cmdr Una Chin-Riley. The Federation, despite being a socialist polity, still has biases, and one of them has been its despicable treatment of genetically modified species like the Illyrians, who have faced systemic discrimination.

The episode was not only a great conclusion to Una's arc on her secret Illyrian identity but also an excellent metaphor for the difficulties of the immigration process and the nature of citizenship, something that many viewers might be able to relate to. Illyrians may not exist, but people's ethnicities are discriminated against all the time, and it was, in this viewer's humble opinion, an excellent way to tackle these sorts of questions.

Many people hailed the episode on social media, and it got me thinking: why are there not more lawyers in science fiction shows? Law procedurals are one of the most common types of television shows after law and medical ones. This year alone, we have on the air True Detective, Shetland, Fargo, and many more.

The sci-fi lawyer seems like a natural extension of our obsession with the legal system, and today, we are going to examine the state of this genre.

A brief history of space lawyers on TV

The sci-fi legal episode has been a quintessential aspect of TV science fiction for decades, especially in Star Trek. A famous example is The Next Generation episode The Measure Of A Man, where the character Data, an Android, has his Captain, Picard, argue for the recognition of his own humanity. You could also point to The Original Series episode Court Martial, where Captain Kirk has to defend himself against a computer that never lies, and The Menagerie, where a trial is the framing device for the entire episode.

It's not merely Star Trek, however. Babylon 5, the space opera about a diplomatic space station, was filled with episodes where delegates for various species had to defend their positions. Characters had to give impassioned monologues, including in perhaps the emotional height (or low) of the series where a desperate Narn ambassador, G'Kar, pleads in vain for the galactic community to step in as the Centaurians try to reenslave his species.

We could look at the interplay of the delegates in Battlestar Galactica, where the character Baltar is put on trial in Crossroads, Part I, for his leadership of New Caprica during the Cylon occupation. It's a cathartic moment, albeit a short-lived one as he is ultimately deemed not guilty, because this is the man who unknowingly betrayed the human race by leaking information to the robotic Cylons. This act would ultimately trigger a vicious genocide of humanity in the process.

There are also many successful book series centered on sci-fi lawyers. For example, Robert J. Sawyer's novel Illegal Alien is all about aliens landing on Earth for emergency repairs, only for one of them to be suspected of murder. A trial ensues as the world watches what happens when another species is put on trial.

Clearly, there is an audience for these types of stories. With TV specifically, the debating of the law is something that science fiction shows have naturally gravitated toward, given enough time. So why has a popular sci-fi procedural yet to come out that centers on the law entirely?

There have been plenty of other aspects of the science fiction legal system. Syfy cops are practically their own genre. We have the robot cops of Robocop and Almost Human. The time-traveling cops of Continuum, TimeCop, and Minority Report. The fringe science of the X-Files and, well, Fringe. The hammer of the law is very well represented on TV, even in space and time.

And yet, when I search for sci-fi legal procedures, I can find only one example: a failed, one-season series called Century City that dropped in 2004 and only aired four episodes before being canceled due to low ratings. The writing for the show wasn't bad, and it had an excellent cast with the likes of Viola Davis and Héctor Elizondo, but it was during the same time slot as American Idol, a ratings darling at the time, and I suspect it could not compete.

It seems strange that this nearly two-decade-old property is the only contender in this subgenre. I have no evidence for this, but I suspect that the failure of this TV show, which is mostly coincidental, has become a reason why this subgenre has not been tried more. Studio executives like a "sure thing," and they are not going to greenlight another sci-fi lawyer entry if the last one was a failure.

Unfortunately for us, that means the closest we will get to the sci-fi lawyer is one-off episodes of Star Trek.

In conclusion, your honor

Unlike police shows, which currently have countless police sci-fi shows on the air — the Beforeigners, Mrs. Davis, The Ark, and even Andor, if you consider that The Imperial Security Bureau is an intelligence agency — there are no other law science fiction procedurals in the wings. The closest is an Apple TV+ movie called Dolly that is not out yet, about a robotic "companion doll" charged with killing its owner only to claim it is not guilty, and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, an MCU property on Disney+ that is more about satirizing the superhero genre than using technology to discuss modern-day problems.

And that's unfortunate because unlike cop shows, which are all about preserving the status quo, legal shows are, at least on the surface, about challenging it, providing us a window on how things could be. As one character monologues in Century City: "…[the law is about] the way things run. What society looks like. Whether this little boy lives or dies."

Law shows are at their best when they are making direct commentaries on society, serving as mini debates on the pressing issues of our time. Science fiction can heighten that premise by using technology to exaggerate the problems that come with current beliefs. These two genres fit so well together. The pilot of Century City, for example, was all about using cloning technology to skewer the pro-life argument, and it didn't feel strange or out of place.

Technology has advanced so much since 2004: this area is ripe for so many new stories coming to you, one case at a time.