Unfairly derided as The Mod Squad with law books, The Young Lawyers was an attempt at a sixties-style social drama with a radical Jewish law student, Aaron Silverman (Zalman King), as its hero. In “Whimper,” an old girlfriend (Susan Strasberg) calls him from jail, ravaged by the effects of heroin, and Aaron hocks everything he owns to bail her out and try to help her. His friends and boss (Lee J. Cobb) warn him that she’s a hopeless case, but Aaron is still in love and won’t listen (at first, he can’t even admit that she’s using). By the end, she’s jumped bail, and when Aaron finds her she turns on him viciously (Strasberg cuts loose with a startling fury); he’s just another narc to her now. “That was another girl,” Aaron says mournfully of the Hallie in his memories. Writer Harlan Ellison disowned this one as ferociously as he did his rewritten Star Trek masterpiece, “The City on the Edge of Forever,” and some of his complains were valid: the flashback scenes are full of shampoo-commercial slo-mo, and there’s an insulting epilogue in which King and Cobb jaw over how humbling the drug problem is, yes indeed. It’s not perfect, but it’s one of the most deeply felt hours of television I’ve seen.
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