"I hate lawyers," Dr. Jason Bull (Michael Weatherly) grouses in one of the opening scenes of CBS's new show, Bull. Bull (and Dr. Bull) wears that disdain for the legal system on its sleeve.
Bull seems streamlined to tap into the current cultural climate. Cynicism and distrust in the system are at an all-time high and the pilot cleverly captures that in the opening. Individual panels show various people on the street giving their different opinions on the legal system. Not surprisingly, not all of them paint a warm and rosy portrait of a system that believes in justice.
We are quickly given a scene of a dead body washing up on shore before being whisked into the world of Dr. Jason Bull and his team of trial consultants.
The dead body is honor student and molly dealer Alyssa Yang, who was invited to a rich-people yacht party and hooked up with wealthy scion Brandon Peters. When Brandon is arrested for the crime, his influential father, Pete Peters, enlists the help of Dr. Bull's team and lets viewers tag along as he gets the grand tour of the consultancy and meet the various team members.
There's the titular character - Dr. Bull, a no-nonsense psychologist with a mysterious, tragic past and abrasive personality. The only thing Bull loves more than being smugly right about jury selection is needling Brandon's pompous attorney. NCIS fans, which CBS is counting on given Bull's placement between two shows in the franchise, will see a lot of Tony DiNozzo in Weatherly's portrayal. Take away the wry film references, add bits of psychoanalysis, and you get Dr. Bull. It's a winning formula, and Weatherly is clearly having fun playing a slightly different version of a quirky, chatty extrovert.
Along for the ride are Benny (Freddy Rodriguez), Bull's consulting attorney and former brother-in-law (anticipate his sister showing up for sweeps), Marissa (Geneva Carr), a former Homeland Security agent who prefers computers and statistics to reading people, Danny (Jamie Lee Kirchner), a former cop with lots of unsavory street informants, Cable (Annabelle Attanasio), a hacker who never passes up a chance to mention she's a millennial, and Chunk (Chris Jackson), a Vogue stylist who literally provides clues based on fashion sense and gaydar. While I'm sure there will be group conflicts later, the group is presented to their clients and the audience as a fine-tuned Swiss watch of efficiency. In their glassy, screen-filled offices, they run through mock trial simulations and use algorithms to show Brandon's chances of an acquittal.
During jury selection, Bull fixates on Bess, a tough-talking mother of an imprisoned man. She's the linchpin in the plan. Bull's trial strategy focuses on her seeing Brandon as a replacement for her own son and convincing her she can save this version of her son by voting not-guilty.
The case becomes more complicated the more the team investigates. Brandon's Xanax-ed out mother leads Bull to Taylor, a classmate of Brandon's who is convinced she and Brandon are soulmates. Her parents, Freddie and Adele, run interference before Bull can question her further. When Brandon's attorney accuses her of killing Alyssa out of jealousy, she attacks him. This blatantly shady behavior pretty much rules her out as the killer. We're only halfway through the show.
All hell breaks loose when Alyssa's distraught father shoots Pete Peters outside the courtroom. Bull uses Pete's convalescence as an opportunity to get Brandon to actively take an interest in his defense. Brandon admits that he is gay and was with a lover at the time of Alyssa's murder.
This is a gift from the gods for Bull, who is still trying to woo Bess to his side by showing her Brandon as a replacement for her imprisoned, gay son. Brandon makes an emotional scene on the stand and Bess convinces the jury to vote not-guilty.
The last scene implies that Brandon was with Taylor's father at the time of the murder and her mother killed Alyssa because she thought Alyssa was standing in the way of Taylor's and Brandon's future together. She thinks she got away with it, but Bull has figured it out and tipped off the cops.
The best part of Bull is that it doesn't help back in its cynicism. The show basically tells the audience that the system is rigged. In a world where people are making memes of Brandon at the second of his arrest, image is everything. Bull doesn't make much effort to actually solve the case and instead focuses on manipulating the jury's emotions to sympathize with Brandon. His thought process is shown to the audience visually in different ways. Sometimes the show flashes to an on-the-street interview with the jurors. Other times the jurors and turn and address Bull directly.
With this level of cynicism, it's unfortunate that the show includes one final scene with Bull's heroine, Bess. After the trial, Bull tracks her down to ask her why she voted not guilty. He gets the weirdest, most wooden speech of this burgeoning television season. Bess immediately (like, the second thing she says to him) guesses that he had a horrific home life and turned to psychology as a way of coping with it. She then pretty much literally says, "Won't someone think of the children?" before walking off into the sunset to save another snarky jury consultant in another town. Oof.
Despite the tone-deafness of that one scene, Bull has a formula for success. Charismatic lead + quirky team + interesting cases = rock-solid procedural that doesn't look out of place sandwiched between NCIS's.
I'm Laurel Weibezahn and I'll be your reviewer for this season of Bull. Any American Gothic fan will know that I enjoy offering wild speculation about soapy mysteries, but I really appreciate a good procedural as well. Let me know in the comments what you would like me to focus on in the upcoming reviews.
So, what did you think of the show? Did you guess who did it? Would you have voted to convict? Did the billion screens in the consultancy distract anyone else, or just me? Who has that many computer screens?
