Last year I reviewed Lincoln Lawyer’s first season, the very entertaining Netflix adaptation of the Michael Connelly novels about corruption and justice in Los Angeles. Defense attorney Mickey Haller embodies American restlessness and striving, almost living in his Lincoln as he takes meetings and goes from court to court on behalf of his clients, high and low, surveying in a week more of the vast and stratified democracy than many see in a lifetime. He’s at home on wheels in a country always on the move.

Lincoln Lawyer’s insight into the problem of being a man in America is this: Mickey adds to his democratic love of justice, equality of opportunity, and duty to defend the downtrodden the lawyer’s touch of aristocracy. He’s always immaculately dressed in a time when men despise and ignore the suit, the uniform of the modern gentleman. He has a driver, too, in a country of self-driven individuals who can barely muster the quorum necessary for the carpool lane.

Above all, the aristocratic privilege is to be one’s own man, to serve another only by one’s choice, and, bound up in this honorable freedom, to rise to the astonishing height of an almost divine providence, to make the difference between life and death for mere mortals. Mickey is not just an ordinary lawyer, not just an ordinary American. He brings a grace we need in our lives, as in our entertainment, but which we cannot demand.

Celebrity

The first season introduced us to Mickey and showed how well he understands the democracy, so that he quickly climbs the celebrity ladder in Los Angeles. Mastery of the lawyerly arts is not enough. It also takes “working” the media, giving them moralistic scandals with just enough prurient interest to arouse curiosity. In a way, that’s what the series is about—money and murders, things that concern us very much, since we don’t usually have good answers when it comes to figuring out why someone would kill or why someone would break the law.

Celebrity somehow involves scandal, partly because it is a status above the middle classes, but partly because it attracts strong passions, which are never free of danger. Since the law offers us the reassurance that we can control crime, lawyers can safely become a spectacle. The audience is not in danger, but we feel somehow, by imitation, the same passions as the people involved in the crimes and the lawsuits. We sympathize with victims, but victimhood is double. One can suffer at the hands of a criminal; one can also suffer, whether criminal or innocent, at the hands of the law.

The second season is accordingly all about Mickey’s success and the problems it brings, about how celebrity can become dangerous. In the first season, he had helped free an innocent man called Jesus—I’m not claiming Lincoln Lawyer is a subtle show—and that became a big media scandal. So some policemen react with anger, a desire for revenge, resentful of the public humiliation. In this season, the police manage to find a legal way of accusing Jesus again of the same murder while avoiding double jeopardy protections and Mickey has to get back on the case. Here, the show reveals a very interesting, fundamental problem: Jesus was first accused because he was believed to be guilty, but the second time around he was accused because he had been proven innocent—so accusation must itself be important, the act of the will of the law enforcement agents, possibly more important than innocence.

The thought arises that maybe no one is innocent before the law, something very important to common law jurisprudence and the institution of the jury by which we defend each other. The dangers of the law, of institutions who exercise authorized powers, is also more urgently a concern for Americans who now fear the law may be used against them, as in lawfare, not despite but because of their innocence. Among other things, innocence makes us defenseless—after all, innocent men don’t even give a thought to the need for alibis. This is obviously correlative to the innocent man who doesn’t even give a thought to the need for defense from criminals who might make a victim of him. The law gathers up fear into itself and turns it into shame, the shame of breaking the law, promising thus release from fear for the law-abiding. Nowadays, we have begun to fear that this isn’t working.

Love and the Law

The defense of this innocent man provides one of, unusually, two fulcrums of a show that, unusually for Netflix, was released in two halves. The second fulcrum is another murder trial. A very wealthy and apparently ruthless, successful real estate developer is found dead in his garage. An attractive Latina chef with a successful fusion restaurant, a community leader and helper of the poor who wouldn’t sell her property to the developer, is accused of murder, and the circumstantial evidence keeps piling up against her.

The law seems to favor the rich over the poor in bringing her to trial. The press, by nature more democratic, takes the opposite view. Mickey steps in to save her, which makes sense on the basis of his celebrity. He’s all about getting the underdogs to win, an American favorite. That’s poetic justice. But he has a personal reason, too: she seduced him. She did that because he’s a celebrity lawyer. Whatever she is, it’s certainly not innocent. Mickey, however, is innocent enough to think he has fallen in love and found an alternative to the American feminist girl-boss, a salt-of-the-earth, pillar-of-the-community woman who loves life. So Mickey takes the ordinary American view that personal life and professional life should go together, on the argument that personal motives strengthen public reason. That may be true, but it’s certainly self-serving.

Consequently, duty, acting against one’s own desires or private judgment, becomes meaningless. This brings us to Mickey’s wives. On his crusade, he has lost two. The second, Lorna, is now his legal assistant, a clever, cheerful woman. This is modern America, so Lorna quickly realized Mickey is admirable precisely because he doesn’t care about his own things enough to be able to be happy, so she divorced him. He’s restless, handsome, undomesticated. Mickey’s first wife, Maggie, however, the mother of his daughter, is a prosecutor, ambitious and righteous, the embodiment of feminist success and personal unhappiness. The failure of his marriage to Maggie is a consequence of shock at Mickey’s immorality. He prefers his cleverness to the institutional demands by which Maggie has succeeded. Our elites are feminists, and feminism demands institutional control of men so that a kind of peaceful egalitarianism is possible. The only prohibition is against daring. This runs against Mickey’s nature, yet it is he, rather than the feminists, who delivers justice to the downtrodden.

The conflict between feminism and excellence is another very interesting aspect of Lincoln Lawyer, which in its understated way presents a beautiful vision of Los Angeles liberalism only to reveal its ongoing collapse. Mickey married Maggie out of self-love. She’s very much like him. The strong, independent woman looks a great deal like the admired American man of two generations back, with a strangely nostalgic touch—professional, reliable, and very confident in the strength of American institutions and their ability to reform America. But of course, Maggie will not stay home to raise the children, nor tame Mickey’s restless heart. Strangely, in this drama, the woman is revealed as fully politicized in her way of life, the man as natural—she’s the public authority, he’s the private, secretive, uncontrollable force that disturbs regulations and baffles elite expectations.

Real Estate Development

Of course, there are limits to the show. One never sees or hears about the tent cities of the homeless in L.A. or any of the compounding problems in basic administration, from picking up the trash to roving gangs of young criminals robbing retail and wholesale, whom we are too embarrassed to describe accurately, much less stop them. This is a requirement of glamor, I suppose. But for my part, I was grateful for the beautification, because it clarifies the issue. Real estate development, the building of skyscrapers and expensive apartments points to the enormous wealth and power of the American elite, but also to the misery of the ordinary people who cannot afford a home.

The developer-neighborhood conflict is at least as old as Frank Capra movies from the Great Depression like You Can’t Take It With You. It shows two different visions of American progress, the technological progress that depends on elites and the political progress that depends on the citizenry. Lincoln Lawyer is in the service of the democratic progress that depends on citizens coming to understand their political power and the duty of acting within the law for a common purpose. In that pursuit, it chastises many liberal delusions about victimhood.

Mickey is serious about helping ordinary people against the privileges of the wealthy—since he’s a defense attorney, he knows those privileges start with paying for the best attorneys or making political friendships through donations, and L.A. is incredibly corrupt. But using celebrity, public sentiment, and public opinion to protect victims turns out to be open to corruption, too. At a time when woke culture wars dominate the media, Lincoln Lawyer moves back toward an older liberalism, more tolerant and more modest about the possibilities of reforming institutions or human nature, and completely lacking revolutionary hysteria. It makes for much better storytelling than most of our recent offerings.