TV: Jury sends lawyers back on the street

By LOUISA CLEAVE

The jury is back and the verdict is in: there'll be a second series of Street Legal on our screens next year.

The legal drama won over Television New Zealand - and about 200,000 viewers aged 18 to 49 every Tuesday during its 13-week run which ended last week.

Production of the next series, with the same cast and writing team led by Greg McGee, starts on November 5. It is likely to air next July.

Series producer Chris Hampson says the show built a following as it settled into its prime-time slot and by the middle of the season loyal viewers had developed a rapport with characters such as Jay Laga'aia's inner-Auckland lawyer David Silesi.

The show appealed strongly to women viewers in the TV2 target demographic of those aged 18 to 39, Hampson says.

Feedback from audiences who saw the first Street Legal telefeature, which later became the pilot episode, caused the producers to drop some characters and adjust storylines to make them "more black and white."

So has Street Legal been a local drama success?

Hampson says TV2 research shows that a "significant chunk" of the audience immediately drops away when New Zealand drama comes on the screen.

"It was great to see this one turn that around a lot. That turn-off factor became less and less every week that it played."

Herald reviews of Street Legal commended the show for growing into its "highly cultivated big-city looks" although it was hampered by some flaws, such as stagy speeches and overacting.

Hampson says there will be few changes to the second series, although the production company has responded to TVNZ audience research.

"We've looked at those episodes which tended to be most successful in the last series," Hampton says.

"Those tended to be stories with a strong action component, with a larger story at the centre of the episode that also concentrated on placing the personal lives of the core cast firmly at the forefront of the story."

The main change from the first series will be fewer courtroom scenes - not for Street Legal the unfolding drama of courtroom cases seen in overseas productions such as The Practice.

The local legal show will continue to be about people and its city location, Hampson says.

"It's not a series about long courtroom scenes and there were episodes that I think we all feel spent too long in the court.

"Street Legal is about the core cast. Some component of their lives is concerned with the court but we're actually more interested in the legal processes that take place around the court, what gets you to the court and what happens afterwards."

New Zealand On Air has funded the second series with another multi-million-dollar allocation of more than $4 million.

"They seem to share our confidence in the series," Hampton says. "What's really good is to see them and Television New Zealand getting in behind a second series of something.'

"Both of them committed [to the second series] before the first series had finished playing and that has given us the ability to plan it properly and go into it on a well-structured basis."