The invisible secretaries

In the real world, much of what happens in the business world wouldn't occur without the hard work of the secretaries. In the legal profession, for example, it is sometimes joked that it is the clerks, couriers and secretaries who actually make justice happen. Yet, in the legal dramas on television, secretaries are conspicuously absent.

Sure, on Ally McBeal there is Elaine Vassal (Jane Krakowski), but from my understanding of the pilot episode, she's a secretary only for the title character, who is a new associate at the firm. Since she's a busybody, it is easy to get the impression that she's the secretary for all the lawyers in the firm. But with all the different people milling about the offices of Cage & Fish, surely John and Richard each have their own secretaries, too.

On The Practice it made sense for Donnell & Associates to only have one secretary in the first season: Rebecca Washington (Lisa Gay Hamilton), who later turned out to be a law student going to school at night who then gets to try cases, and whose secretarial duties are taken over by Lucy Hatcher (Marla Sokoloff). Perhaps it is Boston Legal which has come closest to showing how vital legal secretaries are to the success of the lawyers they work for. For Alan Shore (James Spader), his secretary's desk practically had a revolving door through which went several people, including a young woman who accused him of sexual harassment, golden girl Catherine Piper (Betty White) and Clarence (Gary Anthony Williams), a cross-dressing black man. The latter turned out to also become a lawyer, as if perhaps to suggest that only as attorneys do legal professionals reach their fullest potential.

JAG is not a David E. Kelley production, but even there we see only one true secretary: Lt. Harriet Sims (Karri Turner). I know about Chegwidden's yeoman (first the Smithersly Tiner, then Coates), but that was more like a receptionist than a secretary; it was Sims who had the real secretarial duties.

It is understandable that we don't see secretaries much on the various incarnations of Law & Order. Maybe New York's court system can afford secretaries for the district attorneys, but likely not for the public defenders. When the cops barge in on private defense attorneys, the writers and/or directors choose not to show us the cops bypassing the receptionists and secretaries. In the episode in which former Will & Grace star Eric McCormack appeared as a 'sugar daddy' suspected of killing his 'sugar baby,' however, we did see the rich man's secretary running interference between the cops and her boss.