“You take the good, you take the bad

You take them both, and there you have

The Facts of Life…”

So went the theme song to Garrett’s Girls, a back-door pilot that ran as the Season 1 finale of the NBC sitcom Diff’rent Strokes in May 1979.

On the other hand… who remembers this episodic plotline from a well-known sitcom that aired back in January 1974?

Ken and Kathy Kelly plan to adopt a (Caucasian) boy named Matt from a local orphanage. By chance they also adopt Matt's two best friends: Dwayne, an African American, and Steve, who is Asian… much to the chagrin of the Kelly family's bigoted neighbor Mrs. Payne.

To be fair, it would help to know that I left a few important words out of this Wikipedia description…  “Ken and Kathy Kelly, friends of Carol and Mike.” 

(Viewers never saw these “friends” before or after that one episode, by the way.)

“Back-door pilots”-- or, pilots that are embedded into an existing TV program rather than being created independently– have sometimes been wildly successful. Maude was born out of All in the Family in that manner. Mork and Mindy spun off of Happy Days. And much more recently, the NCIS franchise on CBS got its start from JAG– a legal drama that ran on CBS through 2005. 

But for every pilot’s happy landing (see what I did there) there are countless others who are never picked up, left to toil in some sort of TV hell populated by characters who briefly infiltrated a would-be parent show. Smallville, Charmed, and Gilmore Girls all tried and failed to launch spinoffs. And The Office (U.S. version), as big a hit as it was for NBC, generated little to no interest in The Farm (about Dwight Schrute’s family) when it aired within Office’s final season. 

Now that The Good Doctor has joined the spinoff game with The Good Lawyer– a Season 6 episode that aired March 13 in the U.S.-- fans now await TWO important pieces of news…

• Will TGD get a 7th season?

• Will The Good Lawyer get picked up and have the occasional crossover episode with TGD?

Before I get into that discussion, how about if I do a recap of the episode?

(Which might be particularly helpful if you zoned out once you realized it would be a week completely void of Morgan, Lim, Asher, Perez, Jordan, Andrews, and “newbie” Jared)

So-! Will we learn more about attorney-with-OCD Joni DeGroot in the 2023-24 TV season, or did her journey end the same night it began? It drew in 3.41 million viewers, making it the 4th highest-rated episode of S6 to date… seemed to be well-received by viewers (based on what I witnessed on Twitter)… and this review was mostly positive as well (not to mention THIS review). I’ll include my own thoughts as I run through some possible pros and cons for The Good Lawyer.

The PROS of picking up The Good Lawyer:

• The undeniable parallels in compelling backstory, and how it relates to present day, Joni’s neurodivergence and her ability to manage it while pursuing her dreams as an attorney– that was the most obvious mirror to Shaun’s situation. But her reasons for becoming a lawyer (a potentially lengthy tale in family tragedy and suffering in the hands of a fractured legal system) clearly resonated with Shaun’s own difficult upbringing. And as the hour unfolded, Janet’s overall role in Joni’s life looked more and more like the Glassman/Shaun relationship. (Though I agree with the TV Fanatic review that underscored the patchiness of the Joni/Janet story in this pilot episode.)

If TGL DOES get a pickup, the show is likely to engage in the occasional “crossover” episode with The Good Doctor– two character intertwining hours of law-meeting-medicine (or vice versa) designed to increase viewership for both programs as one show’s audience follows the action to the other show. It’s a formerly novel kind of gimmick that now happens regularly with franchise television. Think Grey’s Anatomy/Station 19 on ABC, the various NCIS programs on CBS, and of course all the different incarnations of Law & Order on NBC. If the goal here was to create something crossover-worthy for TGD, I say mission accomplished.

There was also the question of Park recalling the events differently than Shaun. Why wasn’t he up on the stand getting grilled by the opposition, inadvertently hurting Shaun’s case? What about the plaintiff’s sister– wasn’t she, too, a witness to what Dr. Park did or said in Shaun’s direction? Both people were there in the courtroom, but never uttered a word. Again the “no time; the audience needs to understand Joni better” argument applies. But it’s a pretty convenient argument, isn’t it?

But wouldn’t Shaun have taken issue with that in a “typical” TGD episode? And would he be so willing to take the stand and “tell the courtroom about himself,” laying out his ASD like a badge of honor that should prompt extra consideration from the jury? As far as I could tell, his autism had zero impact on his decision-making the night of the accident. It wasn’t like his senses were overwhelmed at some point and he was unable to function…

Again, none of this really matters as the goal of the episode was to make JONI a lead character to root for, and I think they did that. It’s the what-might-have-beens with Shaun and other TGD cast members in the episode that irritated me a bit. 

The CONS (minor ones, I think) of picking up The Good Lawyer:

• Will potential viewers simply dismiss this as a gender-flipped version of TGD? I hope not, as I think it has more to offer than that. ABC might need to market it carefully to set it apart as a younger, feistier cousin (especially to make the most of Kennedy McMann’s Nancy Drew fanbase).

  
  

• Will certain elements of Joni’s OCD wear thin? In other words, will a shortcut to the looming voiceovers (Tap three times or bad things will happen!) be utilized after a certain point so that they don’t wear thin? Will camera angles and voices continue to distort when Joni has an OCD episode?

  
  

• Could Felicity Huffman’s recent criminal past be a turnoff?

  
  

• Is it too late in TGD’s run for a spinoff? Might ABC’s Powers That Be decide to pass on a new legal drama, simply because they aren’t as invested in the six-year-old medical drama with whom it’s affiliated?

To that last point: I don’t think it matters as much as I originally thought it did, given that the NCIS back door pilot aired during season eight of JAG. Eight!!!

But perhaps the most important thing to remember as we wait patiently for the verdict on The Good Lawyer is that ABC appears to be looking for more franchise opportunities for its prime-time programming. They’ve obviously done it with Grey’s Anatomy/Station 19 as I said earlier; they also debuted The Rookie: Feds this past season for crossover appeal with The Rookie, though I’m not sure of the former’s chances of renewal.

All in all, I think Shore & Friedman did what they set out to do: create another unique, compelling, compassionate lead character working hard to make her way in a dramatic, high-risk setting. I hope we see her again.