Written by Max Thornton.
I started watching USA’s new comedy Benched solely because of the cast. The ensemble features The Office‘s Oscar Nuñez, Better Off Ted‘s Jay Harrington, and the wonderful Maria Bamford. (There are also delightful cameos from Community‘s Yvette Nicole Brown and from Albert Tsai, a.k.a. Bert from the late lamented Trophy Wife, one of whose stars, Michaela Watkins, is co-creator of Benched.) Somewhere in the course of its 12-episode first season, I realized that Benched was a little different from the average workplace comedy.
The protagonist is Nina Whitley (Eliza Coupe from Happy Endings, which I promise I’ll watch one day), a high-powered corporate lawyer who has a career-ending meltdown and finds herself transferred to the chaotic, overworked, underfunded offices of public defenders. As one of the show’s taglines puts it, “If you can’t afford an attorney, these guys will be provided for you.”
I know, I know, it sounds scintillating. But it’s really much more fun and more interesting than it sounds.
A lot of the fun comes from the dynamics of the cast. Jay Harrington plays a sharper-edged, ruder character here than he did in Better Off Ted, and he’s clearly having great fun with it as he spars and snipes with Nina. Oscar Nuñez brings the same sort of restrained, seething energy that he brought to The Office (though I’ll admit that seeing him play straight requires a cognitive adjustment I still haven’t fully made). Maria Bamford spends most of her screentime doing her usual blackly comic schtick in the way that only she can, as a woman clinging desperately and tragicomically to her last shreds of mental wellness. Jolene Purdy steals every scene she’s in as sarcastic young intern Micah, a hard-working but no less biting iteration of April Ludgate.
The thing that makes Benched interesting, though, is its setting. I’m accustomed to thinking of lawyers, both on TV and, if I’m honest, off it, as they are portrayed on shows like The Good Wife: members of private firms who are accustomed to dealing in millions, suing each other over legal arcana, and taking on high-profile cases involving high-paying clients. Benched, however, makes law the arena for the scrappy, precarious workplace like failing Dunder Mifflin or little Pawnee.
A sharp contrast is set up between the public defender’s office and the fancy firm for which Nina used to work, and the one for which her tedious ex-boyfriend Trent still works. The P.D.s work in a cramped open-plan office space and they never have enough basic stationery supplies. Their work is a constant struggle just to keep afloat. No priceless vases for the public defenders.
What’s most striking to me about this show is the actual court scenes. There are no thrilling cross-examinations, stirring speeches, or serial-killer convictions in this courtroom. Instead, court is a relentless mill of poverty and structural inequality. The defendants whom Nina and her coworkers represent are the kinds of people who aren’t usually on TV: really poor people. They are homeless, they are single parents, they are disproportionately Black, and they are doing what they can to stay alive. They are often guilty of what they’re accused of, but these are minor infractions usually committed for lack of alternatives, and the reason they’re in the courtroom is because the system targets people like them.
Structural injustice, it must be admitted, is not the main point of the show. It’s primarily a workplace comedy and a relationship comedy, and it mines a lot of both plot and gags from pitting Nina and Trent against each other (they’re opponents in court AND in love! How wacky!). It might be that the centering of Nina and Trent is a bait-and-switch in the style of Orange is the New Black-–a pretty white lady protagonist as Trojan horse for telling other people’s stories. It’s also, of course, quite possible that systemic inequality was never meant to be more than a backdrop, but regardless of the creators’ intent, the events that took place in the US over the months in which Benched aired its first season have brought the inadequacies of our legal system to the fore. In the light of Ferguson, it’s now impossible to watch the show without seeing an indictment of a very broken system.
It’s not yet clear if Benched will be renewed, but I hope it will be, and I hope it will get bolder, because it could be something very very special.
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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax. He watches way too much TV. It’s honestly kind of a problem.
