13 Best Courtroom Dramas, Ranked

Yes, this Shonda Rhimes-produced series went from TV sensation to sensationalized soap as the seasons progressed. But as a criminal defense lawyer with more than a few secrets (and a cadre of occasionally-criminal law students), Viola Davis’ talent is unimpeachable.

After growing up the daughter of a Connecticut juvenile court judge, Amy Brenneman played one on TV in this affecting series she co-created, a rare courtroom drama to focus not on lawyers but the person with the gavel. Also great was Tyne Daly as the social-worker mother of Brenneman’s Amy Gray.

This series, which won the Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding drama three times, starred a post-12 Angry Men E.G. Marshall and a pre-Brady Bunch Robert Reed as a father-son lawyer team. Better yet, it tackled issues like abortion and mercy killings, offering early TV a dose of realism.

Most TV actors are lucky to get one memorable lead part, but Andy Griffith got a second with this legal drama. As the title character, the Andy Griffith Show alum played a folksy defense attorney with a penchant for courtroom dramatics — and, specifically, for exonerating his client by incriminating the witnesses.

This two-time Outstanding Drama winner sprang from the mind of David E. Kelly, who also found success with legal dramedies Ally McBeal and Boston Legal. Starring Dylan McDermott, Lara Flynn Boyle, and others, the series focused on Boston lawyers facing moral and ethical quandaries at the dawn of a new millennium.

Billions of viewing minutes on Netflix can’t be wrong: This series is a fan-favorite, and the involvement of a certain princess certainly helps. Patrick J. Adams and Gabriel Macht lead the cast as a college dropout and the high-powered attorney who hires him… and helps hide his deceitful past.

In this spinoff of The Good Wife, Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) gets a lesson in white privilege when she gets a job at a Black-owned law firm. But she settles in and sets to the business of fighting “the good fight” in a world beset by political extremism, social-media artifice, and a president she can’t stand.

Its sequel series never got off the ground, but this show would be a hard act to follow anyway, especially with four consecutive Emmy wins for Outstanding Drama. Boasting an enviable lineup of regular and guest cast members, this show depicted legal proceedings in an American society becoming more sensitive to social issues.

For a generation of television viewers, Raymond Burr was the definitive TV lawyer, playing the titular character in this early entry in the genre. And yet very few of Perry Mason’s cases actually went to trial, so skilled the defense attorney was at clearing his client and ID’ing the actual criminal during pre-trial proceedings.

SVU has surpassed the original Law & Order in ratings and longevity, and for that, we bow down to Mariska Hargitay. But once Capt. Benson has caught the suspect, it’s up to the assistant district attorney — Peter Scanavino’s Dominick Carisi, lately — to make sure justice is served.

Ryan Murphy’s dramatizations of real-life murder cases certainly vary, but there’s no denying the impact of this true-crime production, which had viewers reexamining a lurid story they thought they knew. Special honors go to Sarah Paulson, who as beleaguered prosecutor Marcia Clark endures a trial by media.

Its faults aside, Dick Wolf’s Law & Order universe has kept viewers turning on their TV sets for nearly two and a half decades, and it’s all thanks to this first series. True to its name, half of each episode is devoted to the case-of-the-week’s legal proceedings, and that’s when DAs, EADAs, and ADAs have their time to shine.

The Good Wife is better than “good” for so many reasons. In episodes both procedural and serialized, Julianna Margulies plays an attorney who reclaims her life and her career following her politician husband’s cheating scandal. In so doing, Alicia Florrick works with colleagues, investigators, judges, witnesses, and criminals — each of whom, in a credit to the writers, has a unique personality, including the recurring lawyer who recently got her own spinoff.