Milestones in Television History: JAG: The Military Law Drama That Redefined American Patriotism
Alonso Delarte
Published by Alonso Delarte at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Alonso Delarte
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Table of Contents
Preface
You must be doing something right when your show runs on American television for ten years. It takes a lot of effort to get a pilot on TV, and even that is no guarantee. Each time a show is renewed for another season, it means that people are watching the show and they want to keep watching the show. So what was it about Navy lawyers that produced a show that people watched for ten years?
The three occupations television shows in general most like to focus on are: doctors, lawyers and cops (Oshagan, 2006). In the subset of shows with military characters, M*A*S*H takes care of military doctors, while JAG takes care of military lawyers, though there yet remains to be a show about military policemen (MPs, as opposed to civilian-staffed investigative agencies like the Army's CID or the Navy's NCIS). The L Word, with the character of Tasha Williams (played by Rose Rollins) added in its fourth season, can hardly be held up as an example of a show about MPs.
M*A*S*H and JAG represent two different sides of the political spectrum. The political leaning of TV shows is not always black and white: Budd and Steinman speak of the "ostensible anti-war message" of M*A*S*H. The 30th anniversary reunion special for M*A*S*H showed one clip where the anti-war message seemed to me to be quite clear: a Coronel holds back tears as he complains that innovations in surgery are not keeping up the pace with innovations in weaponry. Contrast this to the view of the world through the JAG lens: "leaders are always valiant, civilians are always cowards, and war is always, always good." (Heffernan, 2002) The first-season JAG episode "War Cries", for example, portrayed the American ambassador to Peru as a coward so eager to get back to America before getting shot he didn't care if any U. S. Marines of Latino ancestry were left behind. The two JAG lawyers in that episode, Lieutenant Harmon Rabb, Jr. (David James Elliott) and Lieutenant Meg Austin (Tracey Needham), by contrast, were cool and composed even in gunfights in which a lot of people on both sides of the conflict looked similar to each other. In at least three JAG episodes over the years, nosey female congresswomen show up on military bases or aircraft carriers and twist the arms of senior male officers to give a woman one more chance. A semi-closeted lesbian C-130 pilot was a recurring character in Seasons 8 and 9, acknowledging gay rights but only barely problematizing "don't ask don't tell."
Most shows on mainstream television are calculated to appeal to a wide Audience. But a few shows are also simultaneously designed to escape critical scrutiny, and JAG was one such show, aiming to deliver military propaganda to a large Audience but be mostly ignored by television reviewers and culture critics. But was JAG simply a tool in the 'conservative' plot to build up defense contracting? And even if it was, in the face of the excessive political polarization of the nation, does it not behoove liberals to scrutinize all successful right-wing propaganda? JAG is a show that will likely frustrate the kind of viewer who is eligible for membership in Veterans for Peace. But that very frustration merits closer scrutiny and discussion.
JAG was created by Donald P. Bellisario, a veteran of the Marine Corps in the late 1950s, (Longworth, 2000, 142) who got his start in television as a story editor on Baa Baa Black Sheep and went on to create Airwolf, Magnum, P. I. and Quantum Leap. Bellisario also wrote for Kojak and Battlestar Galactica, among others. He also created the short-lived Tequila and Bonetti, a series about a New York cop transplanted to California and partnered with a dog; if the show had been any more famous it would have been more frequently derided as a Turner & Hooch rip-off.
This book is meant to be a starting point for further discussion on this show, representing only a small fraction of all I could say about JAG. If in twenty years, someone criticizes the shortcomings of this book as David Scott Diffrient does James Wittebol's book on M*A*S*H, I will feel honored. Closer to the present, a collection of essays on JAG by various authors and an episode guide are much-needed tomes.
There are several people I must acknowledge, who have helped directly or indirectly in my work on this book. My friends in Marine Wing Communication Squadron 18, Lance Corporal Ernie Esparza and Private Estrada. I am also thankful to all the authors who have written about milestones of television history, especially David Scott Diffrient for his book on M*A*S*H and Thomas Leitch for his book on Perry Mason.
A few words of explanation regarding terminology are in order before we go any further. The acronym "JAG" italicized refers to the TV show, otherwise it refers to the officer who is the Judge Advocate General, to the headquarters of the Judge Advocate General, or to the judges and lawyers who work for the Judge Advocate General. For the most part I will try to avoid using acronyms as much as possible, giving the meaning of the acronym whenever discussion of the show makes it absolutely necessary to use the acronym.
The Navy is made up of several different Corps (such as the Medical Corps and the Corps of Engineers), and technically the Marine Corps is just another Corps component of the Navy, even though the Marine Corps has its own rank structure, its own recruiters, its own representative on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, etc. The 4-star Generals of the Marine Corps answer to the Secretary of the Navy. In this book, "Navy" will usually refer both to the Navy and the Marine Corps, but occasionally I will explicitly write "Navy and Marine Corps" where there might be any confusion.
In the military, people are usually referred to by last name. Senior officers sometimes take the liberty of referring to their subordinate officers by first name, whether when addressing the entire unit during a ceremony, or when in private. In this book I did not strive for any consistency in regards to referring to the characters of the show. I will call them by first name or last name as I see fit, though I will strive to give their full name and rank the first time they're mentioned.
Bird's eye view of JAG
Amidst the glut of legal dramas of the 1990s, JAG was the only legal drama to feature members of the armed forces as its regular characters. The show's main protagonist was the character played by David James Elliott, the Navy lawyer and former aviator Harmon Rabb, Jr., who found an excuse to get in the cockpit of a fighter jet almost every time the case took him aboard an aircraft carrier. With the second season addition of Sarah MacKenzie, a Marine lawyer played by Catherine Bell, the show's writers became increasingly distracted by the hesitant attraction of these two characters. In the first decade of the new millennium, the number of new legal dramas on television dwindled, giving way to crime scene investigation dramas (such as CSI), while JAG's successor, NCIS, is presently the only crime scene investigation drama pertaining directly to the military, although its main protagonist is a civilian with military service under his belt. Yet, JAG owes as much to previous legal dramas like Perry Mason as it does to previous shows with military characters, such as M*A*S*H (both of these last two shows named have been widely recognized as milestones of television history). Most JAG episodes put some concept pertaining to the military on trial, even if not always an actual defendant character.
The show itself was, in a way, on trial by the military and by NBC in the first season. In the commentary for the pilot episode, Bellisario says the Navy did not provide any help in the first season. The idea of a show foregrounding crime committed by military personnel was a hard sell from a recruiting standpoint, and as series creator Donald Bellisario acknowledges (in "The Military Accuracy" featurette in the last disc of the Season 1 boxed set), the show came out when the Navy was still sensitive about the Tailhook scandal of 1991. While Marines disapproved of incorrect surface details in A Few Good Men such as the two defendants saluting indoors and not under arms (every Marine veteran in the theatre groaned, according to Bellisario in commentary for the JAG pilot episode), potential recruits would certainly not have been enticed by the idea of the Service being populated by morally misguided monsters who have the approval of their superiors.
But JAG's first two seasons actually increased recruiting, especially for legal Military Occupational Specialties (MOSes) such as lawyer, legalman and military police. The reason the Navy has withheld support for certain productions, such as the film based James Webb's novel Fields of Fire, is that they depict illegal actions as frequent and routinely unreported and unpunished. With JAG, however, making JAG lawyers the protagonists should have indicated to the Navy that the crimes depicted would be investigated and punished, which is indeed how the show turned out. And so, the show was acquitted in the eyes of the Navy, but NBC was not satisfied with JAG's performance in the crucible of Nielsen ratings. While the 2-hour pilot episode acquitted itself nicely with a first-place 11.0/21 finish in the 8 PM Friday slot, the next two episodes, 1-hour at 8 PM on Friday, were both beat by Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman on CBS.
The show was picked up by CBS and the Navy began to cooperate with the producers, allowing access to military vehicles and locations and thus decreasing the production team's reliance on stock footage (as Bellisario explains in the commentary for the pilot episode). With military cooperation came also ideological pressure on the writers to not offend the military and maintain their cooperation. Another pressure was CBS's desire for a less expensive show, and Bellisario satisfied this by making the show more of a courtroom drama. In the first season, Harm and his partner Lt. Meg Austin (Tracey Needham) stepped into a courtroom only once, and an Iraqi courtroom at that. There were still opportunities for adventure after the shift to the courtroom, such as Harm finding an excuse to pilot a plane almost every time a case took him to an aircraft carrier. Whether set in the courtroom or in the skies, each JAG episode earned "Frasier-caliber ratings," especially in the "patriotic" 2001 – 2002 season (Season 7). (Heffernan, 2002) In 2003, TV Guide commented that JAG was "riding a wave of star-spangled patriotism, scoring solid ratings for CBS even though it's up against Fox juggernaut American Idol." (Schwed, 2003, 28)
But by many standards, the military legal drama JAG is not a television milestone. Its cinematography, while thoroughly competent, did not push any boundaries. Its storytelling, often didactic, generally proceeded in a straight line, and when it did not, it was usually modelled on some much earlier precedent. While allowing for the fact that given the significant fragmentation of the television-viewing public meant that JAG could never hope to match, much less exceed, ratings for M*A*S*H, JAG's ratings were high enough to sustain a 9-year run on CBS after being dropped by NBC. But the show never seemed to generate the same kind of water cooler talk and critical interest shorter-running contemporary legal dramas were able to, such as Ally McBeal and The Practice. Ally McBeal (Calista Flockhart) single-handedly killed feminism, but Sarah MacKenzie (Catherine Bell) did not resuscitate it, despite being a far more suitable rôle model. Deborah Jermyn, in explaining that Sex and the City is a landmark of television, asserts "that a television milestone should in some sense push or reimagine the boundaries of the medium" and that the possibilities of television be "different, expanded, more invigorated" after the run of the show under consideration. Indeed it might be easier to argue milestone status for almost all the other shows mentioned in this book. Even by the Family Guy yardstick mentioned by David Scott Diffrient in demonstrating that M*A*S*H is a television milestone JAG falls short: M*A*S*H has had one homage sequence on Family Guy as well as well as several dialogue references besides the one Diffrient quotes, while JAG has only had one Family Guy homage sequence, and calling that an "homage" may be a liberal use of the term.
The few critics who've written about JAG either have some pretty harsh words or are unquestioningly admiring. "JAG is ponderous, preachy, and, in spite of all the important-sounding world-stage action, deadly dull. What's in it that is so stultifying is almost like some black TV magic, an ingredient in the pixels that saps viewer energy." (Heffernan, 2002) JAG has certainly had its share of dull moments: A subplot in the episode "Secret Agent Man" about an incident of plagiarism at the Naval Academy served only to subject viewers to endless blather about academic honesty without providing an example of the allegedly plagiarizing essay; the boredom of the blather being relieved with each return to the main plot, in which Harm had to retrieve a bugged limousine from the Philippines. TV Guide, by contrast, thought that with "its combination of sexy stars and tough, timely issues," JAG was a "hit drama right on target." (Schwed, 2003, 27)
In the January 2011 issue of National Jurist, a magazine for law students, JAG actually placed 5th in a list of 25 best and worst legal TV shows, but amazingly, the article said next to nothing about JAG. The judges, professors of law or TV studies, had far more to say about middle-of-the-pack shows Boston Legal (#11) and The Practice (#16). Even Judge Joe Brown at #25 and a single thumb down merits more ink. I will now quote, in its entirety, what National Jurist had to say about JAG:
5. JAG (1995 – 2005) available on DVD
(thumbs up symbol) Dispelled the myth that lawyers aren't macho. – Bob Jarvis
Bob Jarvis is identified as a "professor of law at Nova Southeastern University Law Center and the co-editor of Prime Time Law: Fictional Television as Legal Narrative." We will return to this idea of lawyers being "macho" in the chapter on minorities in the military.
Whatever cinematographic or narrative touches appear new and fresh in JAG, it is always possible to list at least one precedent from earlier TV shows or films. Likewise, the storytelling in any JAG episode has its share of precedents: there are "courtroom whodunits for the Perry Mason crowd, Columbo-style manhunts with the ripped-from-the-headlines timeliness of Law & Order," (Schwed, 2003, 28) etc. As JAG progressed, the producers were never afraid to appropriate new cinematographic techniques from contemporary shows. Thus, in the Season 10 episode "Dream Team," we get CSI-style graphics as Bud explains that Petty Officer Ferro (Joshua Harto) opened a protein bar, inserted puffer fish poison into it and then re-glued the wrapper, premeditatedly causing the death of a man he was accused of killing by involuntary manslaughter. And in "Heart of Darkness," we get wilfully grainy footage of Harm and Mac as they're guided through the Afghan wilderness, whereas most grainy footage on JAG is due to the stock footage not having been that good to begin with; in the latter case there is often an attempt made to not call too much attention to such footage.
And yet it's not because of its garden-variety cinematography and storytelling, nor because of its limited acknowledgement in other television texts that critics and other TV shows dismiss JAG with hardly any scrutiny. Queer studies scholars, for example, are happy to dismiss JAG's high ratings as being almost entirely attributable to the elderly demographic. Ron Becker, for example, lumps JAG with other popular CBS shows of the late 1990s (such as Cosby and Martial Law) and dismisses them all with the blanket characterization of being "programs heavy on aging stars, down-home values, and tried-and-true formulas." (Becker, 2006, 106) After the 1997 cancellation of Ellen, the "ratings growth" of JAG was more or less parallel to that of Everybody Loves Raymond. (Becker, 2006, 174) But even despite the appearance of "gay material" in JAG, Becker prefers to dismiss the show as "older-skewing," (Becker, 2006, 174) without at all examining what exactly that "gay material" is. It's not exactly the message gays want to hear ("You may serve in the military, as long as you hide your orientation") but it merits further scrutiny (later on in this book).
Family Guy reinforced the "only old people watch" refrain of JAG criticism when in the episode titled "Petergeist," Peter (Seth MacFarlane), wide-eyed, watches a JAG episode in which Catherine Bell breaks character to ask David James Elliott whether anyone watches the show:
MAC: Harm, I found the evidence we need. Now we can finally clear that Chief Petty Officer of all charges. Oh, what's the point? Does anybody even watch this show?
HARM: Well, yeah, old people. I mean, they don't really pay attention. They just like the noise and the company. Hey, how you doing? How's that hip doing there? Remember the '40s?
And of course the show is also watched by couch potatoes like Peter who are too lazy to change the channel. Hardly the kind of person Navy recruiters would go for.
And in an episode of Scrubs in which the young Dr. John Dorian, M. D. (Zach Braff) wonders what it would be like to share his apartment with a bunch of old people, he imagines himself walking into his apartment and asking which of his flatmates has been filling up his TiVo with JAG reruns. Theoretically, the elderly don't matter because they're too set in their ways to be relevant to advertisers as consumers or to gay rights advocates as voters, and by extension, JAG does not matter either. But even if we believe only the old watch JAG, it is a mistake for anyone to be dismissive of old people.
Yet, Navy recruiters noticed such increases in walk-ins on days after a new JAG episode aired that after the first season the Navy started cooperating with the show's producers, granting them access to locations and vehicles. It is unlikely that the Navy would have had such a change of heart if those extra walk-ins required the aid of walkers to get through the recruiting office doors. In return for this cooperation, the show became a propaganda mouthpiece for the military, with many episodes that seemed to question military policies but ultimately upheld them as being exactly right.
In fact, JAG was the perfect propaganda for the military in a capitalist society, and worse, for the kind of naïve patriotism expressed as flag-waving and blind trust in the president which became so prevalent after the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001. Nineteen terrorists hijacked four planes, crashed two of them into the World Trade Center, and another one into the Pentagon; the fourth plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania but is thought to have been meant for the White House. After those tragic events, the rest of the world, full of sympathy, was ready to help America bring those responsible to justice. The reaction from the American people was less nuanced, as they were in agreement with George W. Bush's indiscriminately vengeful rhetoric ("You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror") and supported the capture and trial of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator who had nothing to do with 9/11, and whose atrocities against his own people, committed with American-supplied biological weapons, were of little concern to Americans prior to 2001. In 2004, with Bush up for re-election, few people wondered what had happened to Osama bin Laden, who had been neither convicted nor exonerated for the 9/11 attacks.
This kind of blindly-trusting patriotism would not allow concern for innocent bystanders in those countries said to harbour terrorists, an attitude reflected in the 2002 episode "The Mission." Lieutenant Commander Jack Hillyard (Brian McNamara), battle group lawyer aboard the USS Seahawk, personifies the bleeding heart liberals who would allow the enemy to escape in excessive caution against hurting civilians. At the beginning of the episode, a spotter on the ground identifies al-Qaeda terrorists on horseback in the Khyber Pass trying to escape to Pakistan under cover of night. Reconnaissance experts aboard a recon plane concur with that identification, and fighter jet pilots ask Hillyard to confirm that engaging that target is within the rules of engagement. Hillyard asks for assurance that the horsemen are not civilians, giving them time to disappear into Pakistan. Apparently, the mission of the battle group lawyer is to 'rubber-stamp' decisions to attack, though the episode never uses that word. Harm and Mac are dispatched to the Seahawk to set Hillyard straight in a meeting with some of the ship's highest ranking officers:
HILLYARD: How can we ever be sure there won't be civilian casualties?
RABB: We can never be sure, Commander. Civilian casualties are inevitable... You have a problem with that?
HILLYARD: Yes, sir.
MAC: We all do, Commander. But that's a risk we have to take. We are a nation at war.
Harm does mention technologies like real-time data links and GPS that assist intelligence officers in identifying al-Qaeda, but in this episode he does nothing to explain to Hillyard how these technologies are used to ensure the risk of collateral damage is minimized. Mac has the last word in the scene, saying we are at war, as if that ought to be enough to assuage Hillyard's sense of moral responsibility. Later in the episode, Mac takes Hillyard's place on the bridge and rubber-stamps a decision to bomb a school said to have been taken over by al-Qaeda. When asked, Hillyard whimpers that he disagrees with Mac's decision and would have asked for assurances that there were no civilians in that building. At the end of the episode, the captain compliments Hillyard's legal expertise but says he will ask for him to be transferred to another billet. Hillyard is completely ineffectual as a naval officer; it doesn't at all occur to him to volunteer to accompany the spotter on the ground in order to understand how the spotter makes decisions about whether or not to call a target in. The episode does show us what the spotter sees: at the beginning of the episode we see through his binoculars a green-and-black image of several men on horseback, and he reports them as al-Qaeda members who are "well-mounted and heavily armed." Hillyard at the spotter's side could have asked: "How do you know they're well-armed?" Or he could have seen it for himself.
But in real life, Osama bin Laden escaped, not because some weak-willed military lawyer failed to make a decision quickly enough, but because George W. Bush lacked the "presidential will" to capture the alleged mastermind of the terrorist attacks, to use retired Army General Wesley Clark's phrase. In March 2003, Bush ordered "major combat operations" to begin in Iraq, and in August 2003, 53% of Americans thought Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, "was personally involved in the September 11th terrorist attacks," according to a Gallup poll quoted by CommonDreams.org.
Later on in Season 7, in the episode "In Country," we see some subtle backpedalling from "The Mission." Series regular Lieutenant Bud Roberts (Patrick Labyorteaux) has now replaced Lieutenant Hillyard as the Seahawk's JAG lawyer, and instead of Hillyard's impotent pleas for "assurances" that there won't be any civilian casualties, Roberts quickly asks more specific questions towards making the determination to approve the strike.
However, it was a rather rare occurrence to put a character critical of the conduct of the war in uniform. JAG's writers preferred to heap their scorn on the supposedly liberal news media, with the episode "First Casualty" being an excellent example, ending as it does with a fantasy of an arrogant news reporter humbled and forced to apologize on national television. Stuart Dunston (John D'Aquino), a reporter for ZNN (a very thinly disguised CNN) who was already established in previous JAG episodes as an arrogant glory hog, has managed to tag along with a SEAL unit and even rescues one of them when they're ambushed. Soon afterwards, Dunston delivers his report, blasting the accuracy of military intelligence and showing his injury. But anyone expecting a thoughtful, nuanced critique on the practice of 'embedded reporters' will be disappointed when they finish watching this episode, as they'll see its whole purpose was to chastise the news media. Early on Harm suggests that blame should be assigned to whoever allowed Dunston to accompany the SEALs in the first place, but when the Secretary of the Navy (played by Paul Collins) says he's the one who authorized Dunston's embedding, Harm quietly drops the issue. The focus of the episode then shifts to the issue of how to make Dunston accountable for his actions. Harm and Mac suggest to Admiral Chegwidden (John M. Jackson) that he ask the President of the United States to authorize convening a court-martial for Stuart Dunston. After that, Harm, Mac and Commander Sturgis Turner (another JAG lawyer, played by Scott Lawrence) have a conversation that seems almost a debate that has been arbitrarily put into the mouths of these characters.
TURNER: The media are just as important as the military in defending liberty.
MAC: But there's a big difference. We have to account for our actions all the way up the chain of command. Who polices the media?