Your Next Guilty Pleasure Binge Is A Forgotten Legal Series, Finally On Netflix

Procedurals are the mindless comfort food of television, but not all procedurals are created equally. Some are like Taco Bell, taste great, but you look back hours later at the mistake you made bingeing that much that fast. Others are more like Five Guys, quietly filling with no marketing budget. When it comes to legal procedurals, Boston Legal is the former, but Netflix’s latest acquisition, Franklin & Bash, is the latter. A surprisingly stacked series that aired for four seasons on TNT and should now, finally, find an audience on the world’s largest streaming service.

Franklin & Bash stars Breckin Meyer as Jared Franklin and Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Saved by the Bell’s Zach Morris himself, as Peter Bash, two hotshot young lawyers who refuse to play by the rules. After taking down Damien Karp (played by Reed Diamond, the most underrated procedural actor of his generation, you know his face) in a lawsuit over an accident caused by a very distracting ad, the pair are recruited by Karp’s boss, Stanton Infeld (the legendary Malcolm McDowell) to work for him, with the caveat that they are allowed to do exactly what they were doing before, namely, ignore all the rules. Bringing in their law school buddy, Pindy Singh (Kumail Nanjiani, his last role before breaking out in Silicon Valley), the pair turns the stuck-up law firm upside down as their unorthodox methods keep winning cases and annoying the establishment.

As far as legal procedural setups go, it’s one of the oldest in the book, and of course, Franklin is the snarky short one while Bash is the taller one women can’t help but love (or so he thinks). Franklin & Bash, like Boston Legal and Ally McBeal before it, leans into the absurd, with over-the-top cases and clients, but that’s why it holds up a decade later on streaming. The comedy isn’t topical (which has doomed Murphy Brown in the age of streaming), it’s all character and situation-based, ironically, making this unheralded TNT Series timeless.

The amazing lineup of guest stars helps as well, pitting Franklin & Bash up against judges that despise the duo, including Kathy Najimi (one of the witches from Hocus Pocus, and also the voice of Peggy Hill on King of the Hill) and because it’s a TNT Series, a Star Trek: The Next Generation cast member is seemingly legally obligated to be included, with Gates McFadden, appearing in every season as Judge Jacobs, who absolutely hates the pair’s antics. Franklin’s dad turns out to be played by Beau Bridges, while Bash’s mother is Jane Seymour, who’s dating New Japan Pro Wrestling legend and former WCW wrestler Yuji Nagata, playing himself, in the strangest stunt casting possible.

Yet, the face that will absolutely get your attention is Rhea Seehorn, playing an Assistant DA, in her last role before breaking out as Kim Wexler in Better Call Saul one year after the cancellation of Franklin & Bash. We were close to a world in which Seehorn had to pass on one of the best shows of the last decade because she was co-starring with Mark-Paul Gosselaar.

Franklin & Bash is, for the first three seasons, a series of escalating cases with the two pulling off the win at the last moment thanks to their creativity, ingenuity, and dumb luck. It’s a simple concept, but it’s also fun, and easy to binge, but if you bail before Season 4, it’s alright. The last season was a victim of TNT’s rebranding into grittier, edgier dramas led by Animal House and Claws. The series retains a lot of what made it initially successful, but you can tell the vibe is off, and if you’ve seen enough procedurals, you understand how strange they can feel once the magic has worn off. Still, for three seasons, Franklin & Bash was quietly among the best of TNT’s original series, and one of the last fun legal procedurals.

Don’t lie, you haven’t watched it, but now you can as Franklin & Bash is streaming on Netflix.