Frankbash!

Hey look! It’s a new US TV drama featuring the dude from Road Trip, Breckin Meyer! I love that film! Maybe I’ll love Franklin & Bash! That right there is an excerpt from my internal monologue right before I watched the pilot episode of super lawyer drama Franklin & Bash. Because they’re not just any normal lawyers, they’re like Daredevil and shit.

What’s immediately striking and somewhat grating about Franklin & Bash is its relentless quest to be hip and cool. It’s a drama about two lawyers and yeah that sounds boring, really boring. Fortunately Franklin and his buddy Bash aren’t anything like those boring lawyer stereotypes we all know and meh about. Unfortunately they’re more akin to something out of the Josh Schwartz school of coolä, they’re more like Kooky & Brash. One plays the Wii while the other plays a guitar! INSANE! They have a poster of Zombieland on the wall of their office which is also their house! COSMIC! I can accept that they might very well do this, but I can’t accept that they’re cool because of it.

Americans must really love Raj in the Big Bang Theory because Franklin & Bash have their very own awkward Indian man. Are Indians in America different to the ones in the UK? Apparently they’re all nerdy and have some sort of social disability. While Raj can’t speak to women, guess what! This one is agoraphobic! By the end of the pilot episode he overcomes this fear which is a shame because that’s really all the character has got, maybe he’ll regress in the next episode, not that it’s an interesting story arc though.

If our Indian hermit was a maverick hiring from our cool dudes then what about the black female ex-con! Whoah! You might notice her as that annoying one out of the third season of Heroes and immediately find her annoying just as I did. Totally pointless in both shows. Frankbash (my new name for them) are soon hired by Malcom McDowell’s (is he in everything now?) big fancy law firm. Is he crazy? Just a bit!

During this inaugural meeting McDowell simply reads out the pitch of the show including what sounds like a word for word recital of the character descriptions for Frankbash, the clumsiest bit of writing I have ever witnessed. It transpires that Franklin has daddy issues and Bash still loves his ex. Get over her you douche!

Fifteen minutes or so into the episode I realised something, Bash was Mark-Paul Gosselaar…ZACK FUCKING MORRIS! HOLY SHIT! I thought he was dead! When I used to watch Saved by the Bell I didn’t know many people cooler than Zack fucking Morris. Frankbash must be cool then. From this point I forgave the lame exposition and started getting into the show. For all its flaws (and there are many) it is reasonably entertaining and watchable in the same way that Bones is (I suppose).

"When I grow up I'm going to be a lawyer!"

Meyer and Gosselaar share a good chemistry and without this the show would be a complete mess. Every other character is boring or annoying and most fans of the show will like it for the buddy element and not the court room escapades, which frankly (ha! Pun!) lack any kind of realism. That said, the actors can only bring so much charm to their characters and the writers seem intent on making Frankbash the biggest pair of dickheads you have ever laid your eyes on.

"When I grow up, I'm going to star in a porn film called  Screeched"

I want to like Frankbash, it’s a bromance and I love bromances, but it’s a bromance between two lawyers, and lawyers as we all know are mostly dicks. In this pilot episode Frankbash not only represent a man who they know is at fault for causing an accident but also make a big deal about how justice should prevail, suggesting that immorality is interchangeable with nobility, which of course it isn’t. You can have two lawyers breaking the rules or two lawyers purveying justice, you can’t have both. Frankbash is flawed but if there’s nothing else on, sure, why not? Let’s watch it, after all it’s got Zack fucking Morris in it.