Breaking the hearts of all of us with a desperate need to see lawyers who are moral, but also brave, stand up to the forces of legal and corporate corruption—ideally, as represented by the sinister walrused face of one Mr. Wilford Brimley—Variety reports today that Hulu’s plans for a miniature John Grisham TV Universe have now been permanently adjourned. The streaming service announced today that it wouldn’t be going forward with either a TV adaptation of The Rainmaker, or 2015's Rogue Lawyer, the actual name of an actual book that god-knows how many people actually read.
(And okay, we’ll get back to the TV news in a second here, but please take a second to dig this synopsis, courtesy of Wikipedia:
Sebastian Rudd is a street lawyer, but not your typical street lawyer. His office is a black customized bulletproof van, complete with Wi-Fi, a bar, a small fridge, and fine leather chairs. He has no firm, no partners, and only one employee: his heavily armed driver, who used to be his client, and who also happens to be his bodyguard, law clerk, confidant, and golf caddie. Sebastian drinks small-batch bourbon and carries a gun.
God damn does Sebastian Rudd sound cool!)
Anyway, neither of these shows, which were being pitched as an interconnected little universe of Grisham-y legal thrillers, is being picked up for series, forcing us to all go watch, what, Goliath instead? And honestly, we’re a little sad—not just because we are now thoroughly in love with Sebastian Rudd, who sounds kind of like a bourbon-swilling lawyer version of the Fonz—but because the whole endeavor sounded crazily ambitious. The two series were being pitched as a new horizon in TV co-dependence, sharing characters and plotlines in a sort of permanent state of crossing over with themselves. It sounds absolutely baffling and mostly unworkable—which is probably why it ended up getting a gavel dropped on its head—but it would have been kind of interesting to see them try.