By now everyone knows about Hulu, the website where you can watch full episodes of your favorite TV shows with minimal commercials and at pretty high quality. Recently I’ve gotten addicted to watching one of my favorite programs that was canceled- The Practice. Watching the first few episodes was completely intriguing for me, especially since I’d never seen the pilot. You can tell that the actors aren’t quite sure of their characters, are still trying to settle into a definite history, and even on the filming side the cinematographers are shaky on how to approach the ‘feel’ of the show. I remember watching the first episode of Law and Order; it was disjointed, messy, and utterly unwatchable. Although The Practice never drops that low, it does sag a bit in parts.

But The Practice is good for the simple reason that although the characters themselves can be a bit trite and the acting borderline melodramatic, the cases that they have truly make the viewer question their moral compass, and the sense of right and wrong. I took a personality test a few weeks ago and one of my strengths was ‘Individualization’, which is the ability to see each person as unique; search for differences and nuances between the lines. Figure out each person’s story, and what led to their current predicament. I think this show absolutely tickles that part of me, because I start off thinking that the murderer should go to jail, and at the end go, “But the mitigating circumstances are such that..”. And any show that can make me give pause and question myself certainly goes up as an easily addictive show to watch. Credit David E. Kelley, the creator and writer of many of these first episodes, for capturing those dichotomies so well.

I gotta go- I’m onto watching another episode.