"A New Life," and The Evolution of JAG

After following a TV show through a lengthy run returning to its first episodes I often find them looking and feeling awkward compared with what came later. After all, the writers, the actors, the showrunners were at that point still figuring out such things as who their characters are, and what tone they want to strike. Still, the makers of a pilot for a TV show have every incentive to "put their best forward" given a pilot's importance in determining whether their show ever makes it into production, and the great likelihood that this will be their introduction to a TV audience if it does--even if what the makers think may be their "best foot" may be subject to argument, and revision. And so it went with JAG in its two-part pilot, "A New Life." The show, famously pitched by its creator Don Bellisario as a cross of Top Gun with A Few Good Men had for its protagonist Lieutenant Harmon "Harm" Rabb as an F-14 pilot who, grounded by night blindness, got a law degree and joined the JAG corps. In the line of that particular duty the Navy flew him and his partner Lieutenant Caitlin Pike out to an American aircraft carrier in the Adriatic helping enforce the no-fly zone over Bosnia to investigate the death of a female F-14 backseater who had just come to media attention after an engagement with Serbian fighter planes that promised to make her the U.S. Navy's next poster girl--and a superstar to those championing the participation of women in combat unit.

Taken altogether the pilot was not high art, nor of any great intellectual heft. Seeing all this the viewer will have no more sense of what was going on in Bosnia, or even just America's part it, than when they started watching. (Indeed, that Captain Thomas Boone--a character the show expects its viewers to reverence--sneeringly dismisses Serbs with the racist epithet "camel jockeys" says a lot about the sophistication the show displayed and expected of its audience in such matters, and one might add, the very hard limits of political correctness in its heyday.) Nor will the viewer come away with much sense of the complexities of the then hot topic of admitting women into combat units. (In line with the popular military drama of the time the show is of course squarely on the side of the integration of combat units by gender, but we never see real exploration of the rights and wrongs and complexities of the matter, all as the evident sexism is a case of stodgy old guys mostly too professional and too politically astute to ever let it really get in the way of the job, and isolated bad apples among the young guys whose sexism "just is" rather than anything more deeply rooted.) Nor does the audience get much grasp of the Navy's legal system. (It can seem relevant that through the series' run the narration with which the episodes begin identifies a JAG's job as "investigating, defending and prosecuting the law of the sea," whatever that is supposed to mean--the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, maybe?--when the JAG corps' task is actually "investigating, defending and prosecuting" the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which sounds less romantic but has the virtue of actually being factually correct. At any rate, like with nearly every legal procedural ever made the law is the last thing on the writers' minds, what the audience gets instead the usual legal eagle amateur detective work with some legal jargon thrown in.) Accordingly the show's "best foot forward" is actually conformity to the crass requirements of network television in a sensationalistic plot centered on a charged murder investigation, and relatively high--even feature film-ish--production values, with this extending to a lot of action by small-screen standards as the flyers do their thing. (The pilot opens with a dogfight, has a transport shot down in the middle, and a recon mission through deadly ack-ack setting the stage for the big finish as all the way through we have the hurly-burly of a carrier cutting through the waves as roaring aircraft take off and land continually on the way to and from missions where they perform the requisite aerial acrobatics.) There is also quite a bit of sex here with the murder victim involved in an illicit relationship with an unknown crew member entailing trysts in unlikely places that have speculation and innuendo running wild, the flirtations between the leads, and even a bit of skin when Raye Hollitt of American Gladiators fame (not just athlete and actress but popular pin-up), pausing in her cabin between a sortie and the gym to change her clothes and refusing to be diverted from her purpose by an intruding Rabb firing questions at her, goes on to do just that (in a scene shot and edited to stay within the bounds of '90s-era prime time network TV's censorial limits, but effective all the same).

Of course, the show could not deliver all of that from week to week. The showrunners could hardly follow up the combination of topicality with the political and sexual charge of the pilot episode's murder case twenty-two times a season, while if the immediate follow-up to the pilot dealt with another naval adventure scenario in the hijacking of a nuclear submarine the series would be mostly landbound, with the action-adventure aspect only rarely again as flashy as it was in the opener. The series also played down the sexuality considerably, with Rabb's play for Caitlin in the pilot not characteristic of his later way with the ladies (indeed, Andrea Thompson's Allison Krennick was rather more aggressive than the fighter jock in their episodes together), and anything quite like Raye Hollitt's display not to be seen again, all as beautiful and appealing as the female cast consistently was, this was still a show about lawyers, not lifeguards. And of course after the show relocated from NBC to CBS, where the management was more accommodating of Bellisario's preference for "less Top Gun and more A Few Good Men," as the show became more "CBS" broadly. Given that JAG was and remained a military legal-action drama it could never quite be Touched By An Angel, but it still softened considerably from what it had been in the edgy, flashy, action-packed, sexy two-hour pilot as the skirt-chasing fighter jock went through nine seasons of "Will they, won't they" before finally settling the matter of the nature of his relationship with his new partner, Catherine Bell's Sarah Mackenzie, all as, far from testing the censors with scenes like Hollitt's the showrunners sometimes played down the "impression" the actresses made even when fully uniformed. (Thus where in the season four intro they use a clip in which Rabb and Sarah stand to attention--with the line of Bell's ample bust very apparent--in season five they zoomed in the shot so that it ends up cropped a little below her shoulders, apparently deliberately.) Not inconsistent with the reverential tone the show struck toward its subject, it nonetheless played its part in how it came to be known as a show for older folks as younger viewers more inclined to edgy fare gave it a pass.