Can I Trust You? – An Impression of Damages

Lawyers. Lawyers and doctors are a staple of television. Anyone who’s done some channel surfing can probably name a few shows about one or the other or both. But I have a question for you channel surfers: do you know why there are so many? I don’t. But I have an idea. Which is good because I’m one of the writers working on Fear or Favour. It’s a web series that follows two lawyers and their kin. That probably sounds familiar. But that’s just the bones. The meat is what makes it better.

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Fear or Favour, Damages, and the Storyteller

Since the first day we sat down to write our web series, Fear or Favour, it was clear that we were treading in extensively charted water. The courtroom drama has been done again and again and again and again. Across the last twenty years you couldn’t mention the words law or order without everyone in the room thinking of the epic series, and nowadays it would be difficult to walk down the street without bumping into someone who isn’t heading home to binge-watch the newest season of Suits on Netflix. There’s something about lawyers that just make great drama. You’d think that after years of our constant exposure to things like fraud in the courtroom, crooked judges, and fake witnesses, television audiences might get a little bored. And the truth is, they do. For all the successful, long-running series’, there are about a zillion more that never made it past their first season. The trick to writing an interesting law drama isn’t to create something entirely new: after all, the law is the law. Instead, it is to take something we’ve all seen before and to tell that story in a way that no one could have ever imagined possible.

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