texallennyc JAG (1995 - 2005/ 225 episodes) depicts the professional and personal life and adventures and work of US Navy Judge Advocate General lawyer Harmon Rabb, Jr., portrayed by David James Elliott. It provides a very well written, acted, and expensively filmed look at inside politics in the US Military at the officer level......Lawyer Rabb is an "O-3" or "Full Lieutenant (he out ranks Ensigns, beginning officers in the US Navy, and Lieutenant Junior Grade officers, "O-1" and "O-2" Navy officers respectively).Lt. Raab is a junior officer, not yet a "field grade" or senior officer (Lt. Commander or "O-4" is the start of the world of senior officers which includes the top officers, Admirals in the US Navy). He's been around awhile, is no longer a novice, yet is young enough and physically fit and vigorous enough for the sort of physically demanding work only young adult males are capable of, for the most part.Who is new and who isn't is always a big issue in the world of career (and non-career) military officers and men. Loyalties and internecine battles within the service are labyrinthine in the military bureaucracy world, and sorting all this out is critical to understanding what goes on in the military, and why things happen the way they do (or sometimes don't) in the military.The military is always dramatic, and thus often used by Hollywood for dramatic presentations filled with electricity and tension between military players who are supposed to be on the same side, fighting for the same cause, but who are often at odds and in personal combat with each other.One particularly good example of all this is presented in JAG Season One (1995), Episode Four titled "Desert Son." (Originally aired on Oct. 7, 1995). The "Desert Son" story is about tragedy and death which results from a human error (later intentionally covered up by the guilty Marine Corps. junior officer perpetrator) during a 29 Palms Marine Corps. base field base artillery exercise .............wrongly calculated and targeted artillery fire injures seven Marines, one of whom later dies. The accused (later proven to be guilty) is a son of a former commandant of the Marine Corps. The 2 Star Commanding Marine Corps. General in charge of the 29 Palms (California USA) Marine Corps. Base is good friends with the retired Marine Corps. Commandant General. Both Marine Corps. generals are very well acted and realized characters seen during the "Desert Son" episode.The story unfolds to present the troubled and errant junior Marine Corps officer son of am apparently retired Marine Corps. Commandant (probably retired, but maybe not.....not clear if the man is retired.......he wear civilian clothes, and walks with a cane due to a permanent battle injury.......however, he gives orders to uniformed personnel during the episode and his orders are obeyed). The story takes several confusing twists and turns, and finally reveals the "Desert Son" junior officer to be guilty of serious misconduct including attempted murder of a fellow junior officer toward the end of the episode.The entire episode is very, very well done, and could easily have been a movie house theatrical feature film of great success. The quality of this episode at all levels, including writing, acting, direction, special effects, action, and camera/ editing work is superb to a level rarely seen in television dramatic series presentations. The "Desert Son" episode (Season One, Episode Four) of JAG (1995 - 2005) is memorable and unusal for its high quality.The famous true life Marine Office, Oliver North, appears briefly in civilian clothing, and does a remarkably creditable job as a movie/ television dramatic actor. North became a radio talk show host after the famous Iran Contra Scandal he was part of during years of the Ronald Reagan US presidency. And earlier episode during Season One of JAG also include then USA President Bill Clinton seen jogging with Secret Service guards, and stopping to speak briefly in a friendly way to JAG star David James Elliott. Former USA President Bill Clinton is presently (2017) credited with 101 different appearances playing himself in various TV shows. Use by Hollywood of actual USA political celebrities and media celebrities who were reporters covering the USA political scene was common in the 1990's when JAG first appeared.JAG (1995 - 2005/ 227 episodes) is a very high quality series worth obtaining and screening from Episode One through 10 years worth of production to Episode 227. It is clearly one of the high water mark shows produced during Hollywood dramatic television history. ------------- Written by Tex Allen, SAG-AFTRA actor and movie historian. More details about Tex Allen on WWW.IMDb.Com -----------------------------

kenvend Most of JAGs episodes were top-notch both in story line and in acting. There was great creativity in producing each show. Even the second to the last episode was well-done and in alignment with the other episodes. But the finale was a great disappointment. I thought it was a mediocre ending to a fantastic series. It was like they just decided to trash all that they had done and accomplished for the sake of seeing who could get out the stage door the quickest and with the least effort. And it was like the producer and CBS just decided that the viewing audience wasn't important anymore. All of the loyal fans they had acquired through the years were just thrown to the wind. Nevertheless, I loved the series from start to second from the finish!

leosun_75 Firstly, I have now seen all ten seasons of JAG on DVD, well wow, it got me hooked. I lived into the characters. I think I am as disappointed at the show ending (in 2005 - now in 2011) as I think the cast were by the looks on their faces in the final farewell tape at the end of the last DVD.Eventually I grew to like Bud. I retract my earlier comments on him. I liked the dynamics between the characters and the stories, particularly the lawyering ones. They had lots ore life left in the JAG creation, they should have gone on - but cut it short in my opinion, a bit like star trek in the 1970's, much to everyones regret.There did seem to smack a little of propaganda in the stories regarding the Iraq War. It felt like JAG at times was the mouth piece of the government. Pity on that.Anyway my thanks to the cast and crew and creators for an entertaining and enjoyable series (10 seasons) - all of them. I;m just a viewer, I can only slightly gleam how sad they all must have been when it ended.Cheers, M

schappe1 When JAG first came on the air, I didn't watch it at all. My politics are a little left of center and I was not impressed by the first Bush administration sending our people to secure the Kuwaiti oil fields. I felt American lives were worth more than that. When a show came on a couple of years later that was advertised by seemingly endless shots of people in uniform saluting planes that were taking off, I just wasn't in the mood for what I took to be a John Wayne vision of the military as a bunch of patriotic action figures with no real depth as human beings.A couple of years later I was visiting my parents and they had begun watching JAG, scheduling their Tuesday evening plans around it. This was not surprising for my Dad, an ex-marine and a solid Republican. It was surprising for my Mom, a Democrat with the same opinion of military adventures that I had. The first episode I watched was the last episode of the third season, "To Russia With Love". It seemed reasonably entertaining and certainly wasn't' "jingoistic". The characters were multi-dimensional, (I certainly noticed that Catherine Bell was!). Since it was a cliff-hanger I naturally had to watch the first show in the fall and slowly became hooked, making the show part of my own regular viewing schedule.I found it a solid, if flawed, drama focusing primarily on the effort, through law, to keep the military on it's moral compass. I'd always liked "The Caine Mutiny" and also liked "A Few Good Men", which seems to have inspired the series. The concept of judging a severely hierarchical organization using a set of standards that ultimately supersedes the hierarchy while continuing to respect it is dramatically interesting and the show drove home the point that military power itself is not enough: it has to have a moral reason for its existence and use.When I used to watch "Star Trek", I presumed that a civilization that could travel across the distances of space would probably be militarily superior to anyone they encountered and that their dilemmas would tend to be moral, (how to use their power wisely), more often than physical, (how to get more power to defeat a threat), and I preferred the "moral dilemma" episodes, even though they were in the minority. In JAG, those episodes seemed to be the norm and the "action" episodes the exception.There were two things I didn't like about the show. One was it's non-linear format, jumping from the main story to a romantic or comical sub-plot or into a continuing background story. I prefer shows that stick to their subject. JAG seemed to be a half-hour drama padded into an hour format by all the "other stuff". I came to resent the "action" shows. They seemed to be a rather silly divergence from what the show was really about, certainly from what a JAG lawyer's job was all about. I remembered watching "Homicide", which was supposed to be an examination of the day-to-day lives of Baltimore homicide detectives but which occasionally was interrupted with episodes the network insisted they make about serial killers, drug kingpins and arsonists so they could advertise it with titles like "City on Fire", etc. It seemed to me that the "action" episodes of JAG, with their "Hunt for Red October" plots, CIA undercover work, continuing stories about Harm's father and brother and mysterious, recurring villains served the same purpose for the network and served little purpose on the show itself.The show went off the air after a decade and I was recently walking through a record store and saw the DVD of the first season of JAG for sale. I bought it on a whim, just to see what the show was like at its beginning. It was a revelation. The shows take place almost entirely in the field and are about JAG investigations. Those investigations inevitably lead to action-packed sequences but at least they grow logically out of a JAG investigation. The show has a completely linear format and thus has a much faster pace but still has more time to tell it's story because it's not cross-cut with sub-plots or ongoing stories. I like Catherine Bell but I like Tracey Needham even a little better. She seems very soft and sexy, (especially with that watery voice), and yet can be tough when the occasion demands. "Tough" is a personality trait but not a type of person and those who have to be hard-boiled to be tough really aren't very good at it. Meg Austin demonstrates that very well.The production values are amazing, especially since the show at that time had no Navy co-operation. Clips and even sets from several movies, (Top Gun, The Hunt for Red October, Crimson Tide and isn't the ambush in "War Cries" from "A Clear and Present Danger"?) are skillfully integrated with stock footage and scenes shot on an old carrier and in a studio give each episode the look of a movie.It's one of the most entertaining shows I've ever seen. Even if there are only two episodes with courtroom scenes, the "moral dilemmas" are still there: the show is all about right and wrong. Even though I liked the later JAG, I'd have to say the original concept of the show was much superior. Apparently the public, (the show was ranked 77th in the ratings that year) and the networks didn't agree. The show got canceled, picked up by CBS and changed considerably and wound up in the top ten, lasting a decade, something very few shows have ever done.At least we've got the DVDs of the first season to see what it was originally supposed to be like.