With a name like American Crime you’d be forgiven for thinking that the ABC show, which just wrapped up its debut 11-episode season, was another in the long line of TV shows about heroic cops nabbing bad guys. They’re popular for good reason – even I, the criminal defense lawyer, am not immune to their pull – but we hardly need another one on TV.  Good thing, then, that American Crime isn’t like anything else on TV.

That’s down to its creator, writer/director John Ridley, last seen collecting an Oscar for the screenplay to 12 Years a Slave. Rather than focus on the crime itself and the “solving” of it, the show takes one crime – a murder (nearly a double murder) in a nondescript California town – and shows how it impacts those caught up in its wake. Not only is that the focus, but Ridley showed that he didn’t really care about any traditional resolution to the case at all.

As a result, the focus is on several families dealing with the impact of the crime – the victims’ parents, the sister of the main suspect, the foster family of his heroin addict girlfriend, and the would-be family of the state’s first main witness. Issues of race, class, ethnicity, and gender bubble through the season, spurred by the stress brought on by the murder and its prosecution.

Amongst all these, the most fascinating was the Gutiérrez family. Tony, the younger of two children, unknowingly gets caught up in the fringes of the murder – he lent a car to a guy who was involved, but had no idea of it at the time. At the urging of his father, he cooperates with the police. This leads to him being arrested, charged as an accessory (mostly as leverage, it appears), and sent to juvenile detention. What happens from there is as heartbreaking as it is inevitable – treated like a criminal, like a thug, Tony becomes one, committing his own heinous act once released.

American Crime doesn’t look like anything on TV, either. A lot of the editing and camera work is intentionally disorienting (often we focus on the person being spoken too, rather than the speaker) and keeps you on your toes. Breaking Bad (Which I’m working through now, finally) may have been cinematic, but not like this. The closest precedent I can think of is Homicide: Life On the Street, which introduced TV to the hand held cinema verite style. Given that the technical flair is done in service of a bunch of fantastic performances and American Crime was always a fascinating, if grim, watch.

All that being said, the show’s greatest asset was also its greatest weakness. By stubbornly refusing to deal with the facts of the case itself, it was difficult to fully comprehend why the various parties involved were behaving the way they were behaving. How are we to judge the initial suspect’s reaction to being imprisoned and being turned into a political prop without having some idea whether he actually did it? He knew, after all. The end result is a fascinating exercise, but it rings a little hollow.

Regardless, I know the show didn’t have wonderful ratings, so kudos to ABC renewing it for a second season. With a new case on the horizon and a second chance to tweak the formula, I expect something even better.

I should not like Raylan Givens. He is precisely the kind of rogue cop trope that drives me so completely nuts, not only as a viewer or reader but as a criminal defense attorney. You know the type – he can’t play by the rules because he’s just so righteous for tracking down bad guys. In spite of repeated violations of the law in ways that should end his career (or at least torpedo many cases he’s worked on), everybody kind of shrugs and winks because, hey, in the end he got the bad guy.

Nonetheless, I like Raylan. And, therefore, I liked Justified, the FX series based on the stories of Elmore Leonard, who created Raylan. That DNA is a lot of the reason Raylan works. He’s interesting enough as a character, a man sort of out of time with the modern world, that his inability to follow the rules kind of makes sense. Plus, when you put dialogue of the quality that populated Justified for so many years in his mouth it absolves a number of sins.

Which is not to say that Justified was ever a one-man outfit. It never could have succeeded if the other characters weren’t as well drawn and executed as Raylan. That goes not only for the major recurring characters, such as the outlaw yin to Raylan’s yang, Boyd Crowder, a racist drug runner with occasional bouts of preaching and speechifying, but with all the supporting characters. Bad guys, too. Justified had the best, most interesting and complex bad guys this side of The Wire.

Another thing Justified had going for it, which it also shared with The Wire (and all of David Simon’s Baltimore stuff, really) is a setting that you don’t see anywhere else on TV. Harlan County was already etched onto the national consciousness as a hardscrabble coal mining region (thanks largely to this award-winning documentary) before Justified came along. But the show made the most of that setting (even though it was shot in California) and what it meant for the people who lived there. Maybe I just liked seeing it because it could have very easily been set across the border in West Virginia, with Raylan working out of my courthouse in Charleston.

Justified never quite got its due while it was on the air. Most critics loved it, but it was never quite able to break through to that top tier of awards. Part of that’s timing. This is a golden age of TV, after all, and it’s hardly Justified’s fault if it was lost in the shuffle to the likes of Breaking Bad, Mad Men, the HBO stuff, and it’s own stable mate The Americans.

Justified was not groundbreaking and maybe not all that deep, but it was damned entertaining. It seemed to take pride in being smartly entertaining, too. I think Elmore would be proud.

Confession time – I have never seen minute one of Breaking Bad. Not out of any critical motive, mind you. It just slipped past me until it was one of those “catch up with it on Netflix” someday things. On the other hand, when the prequel/spinoff featuring Walter White’s trusted attorney, Saul Goodman, premiered, I was on top of it. Aside from the glowing early reviews it’s a lawyer show, which I have a hard time ignoring. Thankfully, the early reviews proved accurate.

“Better Call Saul,” as I understand it, was the tagline in the TV ads Saul Goodman used to drum up business in Breaking Bad. But as this series starts, there is no Saul Goodman (except in a brief flash forward), only Jimmy McGill, struggling lawyer. Jimmy has a con artist past (when he was known as Slippin’ Jimmy) and brother, Chuck, who’s a partner in a big law firm. However, Chuck is now confined to his home by a psychosomatic illness involving an aversion to electrical devices. Nonetheless, Chuck is who Jimmy aspires to be, although without the mental issues.

Thus the first season is basically the tale of Jimmy trying to find his legal niche. He as some connection to Chuck’s law firm, but it’s unclear what that was until several episodes in. On his own, Jimmy resorts to some old trick to drum up business (a staged rescue in which he’s the hero). It works, somewhat, and he stumbles into the field of elder law and even appears to genuinely care about his elderly clients.

But things go wrong when a big case falls into his lap. He enlists Chuck who, quite rightly, argues to bring in his old firm because they have the resources to handle it. Jimmy agrees, assuming that this is his ticket into the firm legitimately – as a rainmaker. Only he learns that not only will he not be welcomed into the firm it’s because his brother has been blocking him at every turn.

This leads to the key scene of the season and the one most interesting to me as a lawyer. Chuck, basically stands up for the standards of the profession. Jimmy, who got his degree from an off shore diploma mill and has a criminal past, doesn’t make the cut. Law is a sacred trust, Chuck argues, ones that doesn’t have any place in it for people like Jimmy. Lawyers bear a particular responsibility, not just to their clients, but to society at large. Being a lawyer, as Chuck tells it, is just as we real world lawyers want it to be.

But the joke’s on us, because for the rest of the population, we look an awfully lot more like Jimmy. It’s perhaps no surprise that when Jimmy becomes Saul he manages to drop in social standing, from not-quite-reformed con man to criminal defense attorney. After all, what kind of person defends murdering drug dealers for a living? At least that’s what people think (and sometimes tell you!).

By the end of the season, Jimmy’s had one more chance at being “respectable” and turns it down. Does it mean that he’s completely turned the corner into the criminal shyster he becomes in Breaking Bad (so I’m told)? Who knows. Maybe he just decided that his idea of respectable and Chuck’s are far apart and the legal profession has room for the both.