Milestones in Television History: JAG, the Military Law Drama that Redefined American Patriotism

Milestones in Television History: JAG: The Military Law Drama That Redefined American Patriotism

Alonso Delarte

Published by Alonso Delarte at Smashwords

Copyright 2018 Alonso Delarte

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Table of Contents

Preface

Bird's eye view of JAG

Military authenticity

Legal authenticity

Ripped from the headlines

Minorities in the military

AfterJAG

Bibliography

About the author

Preface

About halfway through May 2018, the Heroes & Icons (H & I) digital TV channel announced that JAG reruns would begin May 30, starting with eight consecutive episodes that day.

It was a logical choice for a digital TV channel that was already airing reruns of Black Sheep Squadron and all Star Trek series so far (with the obvious exception of Star Trek: Discovery).

For one thing, JAG is a show that ran for ten years and could very well have run another ten years (the success of the spinoff NCIS is proof of that, I think).

Compare that to Black Sheep Squadron, which ran for only two seasons for just 37 episodes and would therefore cycle through much quicker than JAG at a pace of eight episodes each week.

H & I was running just one episode a week when they added JAG to the line-up, now they're airing two episodes on Saturdays and one episode on Sundays, meaning three episodes a week.

At this point, H & I has run through all of Black Sheep Squadron several times now, and will probably run through again before completing one run-through of JAG.

You must be doing something right when your show runs on American television for ten years like JAG did. 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 the ten years of its original run? And kept watching in reruns on USA Network and will almost certainly watch in reruns on H & I?

The three occupations television shows in general most like to focus on are: doctors, lawyers and cops (Oshagan, 2006). Heroes & Icons definitely has cops covered, with shows like The Commish, Hill Street Blues, Hunter and NYPD Blue.

Not to mention Real Stories of the Highway Patrol, which will get pushed to the early A.M. part of the schedule if not pushed off the schedule altogether to make room for Nash Bridges, Early Edition and JAG.

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.

Adding JAG to the Heroes & Icons line-up helps remedy the deficit of lawyer shows on that network. Though it's certainly possible, as far as I know, that Heroes & Icons might add Law & Order (or any of its spinoffs) to its line-up in the future.

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 Colonel 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 that 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 Black Sheep Squadron 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.

JAG ran on NBC for just one year, and then it was picked up by CBS and ran for nine years. For a long while, JAG reruns were a fixture on USA Network, and now the same can be said for NCIS reruns. It is possible that JAG spin-offs NCIS and NCIS: Los Angeles will be more successful and more influential than JAG. But the success of NCIS is hard to imagine without the success of JAG first (but also CSI, despite protestations in dialogue to the contrary).

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 books.

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, was for a time 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 helped increase 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 on 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)