Beholding Beauty

Franklin & Bash is one of the newest TV lawyer shows, and I like it … mostly. Sometimes, the two totally cute guys with the totally cool lifestyle try totally too hard to be enviable, but they are totally appealing to a young, hip, upwardly mobile demographic that wants amazing beautiful people to live an amazing lifestyle filled with other amazing beautiful people and attend amazing parties. As lawyers, F&B champion the underdog, but this last week, they sent a message that concerns me.

The set-up included a plain Jane who is confident she was fired for being too physically beautiful, but it is clear to anyone that is not the reason. She worked at a Playboy kind of media publication staffed with women whose plastic surgery is covered by the company’s medical plan. The other employees obviously availed themselves of that perk, but not this employee, so the story centers on how to represent her to a jury as being more beautiful than the rest of the very beautiful staff when she is obviously not as physically beautiful as her co-workers.

Clearly there is a specific standard for how a female employee is to look and dress, and Franklin & Bash’s new client is nowhere close to achieving it. However, rather than being honest and telling her she was probably fired for reasons other than her amazing physical beauty, which would not be as funny for the episode, the guys try to sell the "I'm incredibly beautiful" story in court. There's a need to base the case on the truth, but no one wants to go near that politically incorrect honesty. As the lawyers play to the women of the jury by pretending to believe the physical beauty claim of the plain Jane, including a hot, steamy, sexual kiss on the witness stand, the episode that has so much promise falters into mediocrity.

Most of the women with whom I am friends are physically attractive, some more so than others, but their beauty comes from within: sparkling wit, engaging humor, deeply-felt empathy, and sincere friendship. What Franklin and Bash miss is how an average woman can be so confident that she is more beautiful than co-workers who reflect the popular media standards for physical beauty. It is the person, not the package, that makes her so well-liked, accepted and appreciated by her co-workers – and a target of jealousy from a woman whose own father appreciates the beautiful packaging, but does not know the intrinsic beauty of the woman inside it. It's okay to confirm a beauty that is not based on physical appearance, but that message is never sent because no one is willing to articulate it.

TV scripts don’t always have to go for the joke to make the point, but there was an opportunity missed to at least make a statement. Had the two lawyers distinguished for the client that while she could not compete physically with the beautiful plastic people, she has an inner beauty that distinguishes her from them, perhaps for the teen girls and young women watching the two hot guys drooling over the plethora of bikini babes bouncing beach balls in an outdoor pool, the subtle message could have been more powerful than the overt joke. Women do not have to rock a bikini bod to be beautiful or to be wooed by great guys, but that is the message the episode sends by refusing to be honest about true beauty.

Boobs eventually give into gravity and looks also fail no matter how often reconstructive surgery is performed; however, the qualities that truly make a woman attractive for her lifetime remain intact, and that’s beautiful and worth defending.