The WORST episodes of L.A. Law
Every episode of L.A. Law ever, ranked from worst to best by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The worst episodes of L.A. Law!
On this critically acclaimed drama about a top Los Angeles law firm, some of the best battles take place outside of the courtroom. In the bedroom, in the courtroom, or at McKenzie, Brackman, Chaney & Kuzak's staff meetings, the firm's ambitious, competitive attorneys confront conflict between their own desires, their obligations as attorneys, and their principles as human beings.
#1 - Zo Long
Season 7 - Episode 3 - Aired 11/5/1992
Brackman sees life's underbelly from behind bars; Jonathan gets in a mudslinging contest in the final days before the election, and makes comments about the attack on Markowitz that draws the anger of the other members of the firm; Mullaney prosecutes a child abuse case in which the opposing counsel is a nun; Zoey seeks a change of venue for her life and career; Kelsey finds it difficult to work at home while taking of her husband, who is increasingly frustrated by his disability.
#2 - Spanky and the Art Gang
Season 7 - Episode 10 - Aired 1/14/1993
Becker and Morales successfully defend the dominatrix accused of Schuller's death; Rollins represents a developer who deliberately commissions an offensive sculpture for one of his buildings in retaliation against a City Hall ruling; Brackman is less than thrilled at the efforts of his ghost writer until a publisher decides to option the book; McKenzie goes to bat for Taylor when she's denied insurance coverage; Markowitz balks at preparing for the trial of the men who attacked him; Taylor gets a unwelcome late night visitor.
#3 - My Friend Flicker
Season 7 - Episode 5 - Aired 11/19/1992
Melman resigns as office manager and returns to working for Becker; McKenzie represents a friend in a reverse discrimination case; Markowitz struggles to overcome his fear of identifying his attackers; Melman asks Mullaney to father her child; Brackman begins his memoirs; studio mogul Ben Flicker takes Becker under his wing after Becker devises a creative financial approach to settling Flicker's daughter's divorce; Taylor's anonymous admirer continues to send her presents; Markowitz buys a gun for protection.
#4 - Helter Shelter
Season 7 - Episode 7 - Aired 12/10/1992
Brackman is distraught when the pocket watch he inherited from his father disappears; new associate Melina Paros joins the firm; Becker accepts an intricate assignment from Flicker, forcing him to deal with the manipulative wife of Flicker's silent partner; after Lincoln escapes from Benny and ends up at the pound, Markowitz takes extreme measures to get the dog released; Brackman gets a ghost writer for his autobiography; Taylor's pursuer sends her a gruesome gift, which only serves to alarm her further as she begins to suspect every man she encounters; Melman doesn't know how to handle Mullaney's new-found ardor; Paros prosecutes her final case for the State's Attorney's office as she attempts to prove that a woman may have abused her children.
#5 - Fetus Completus
Season 2 - Episode 16 - Aired 3/3/1988
Feelings run high among the attorneys at the firm when Kelsey represents a doctor petitioning the court to allow him to deliver an endangered eight month old fetus by Caesarean section against the wishes of the child's father and terminally ill mother; the Brackman reconciliation collapses in a hail of pottery, and Becker's ammunition in their settlement talks backfires badly; Kuzak and Van Owen clash over trial strategy; Brackman follows in his father's footsteps when seeking solace over his divorce woes.
#6 - All About Sleaze
Season 6 - Episode 11 - Aired 1/30/1992
C.J.'s client accuses the Government of negligence in the rape-murder of his wife; Becker's ego is cut down to size over the airwaves; Mullaney's presence stirs up trouble between Zoey and Rollins.
#7 - Parent Trap
Season 7 - Episode 12 - Aired 2/11/1993
Rollins represents a man whose drunk driving caused the accident that left his pregnant girlfriend in a coma, and who is now suing to keep her on life support until his unborn child can reach full term; Salerno discovers that Morales's gangbanger client has literally left him holding the smoking gun, and leaks the information to the district attorney's office, leading Morales to be jailed for contempt of court when he refuses to admit that he has the weapon that will convict his client; Mullaney's chain smoking, hard-drinking father comes for a visit bearing bad news; Markowitz tells Mullaney to offer his attackers a plea agreement to end the case, but Kelsey intends to press on by filing a civil suit for loss of consortium; posing as the babysitter, Salerno kidnaps Lucy Morales.
#8 - Second Time Around
Season 7 - Episode 2 - Aired 10/29/1992
6 months have passed since the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and Brackman becomes his own worst enemy when he sues the city for false arrest on the charge of disturbing the peace; Jonathan begins to compromise his principles as he ramps up his bid for election; Mullaney accepts a position in the District Attorney's office; Markowitz is discharged from the hospital and begins the slow road to recovery; Becker is back from his trip around the world; when a dying man confesses to committing a murder for which Leland successfully prosecuted someone else 33 years earlier, Daniel agrees to represent the man Leland sent to jail in an attempt to win him a new trial; Zoey returns to work, and finds herself unhappy in her new assignment to the asset forfeiture division.
#9 - Wine Knot
Season 7 - Episode 4 - Aired 11/12/1992
Markowitz, Rollins and Brackman return to work; Becker gives his client some very Zen advice when a case of sour grapes pits sibling wine makers against each other; Taylor follows the lead of an unscrupulous client in strong-arming the opposition out of a fair settlement; Roxanne makes a dramatic decision in her quest to give her life some meaning; Markowitz and Stulwicz go on an impromptu excursion and make a new friend; Rollins asks Kelsey for forgiveness; Taylor gets an extravagant bouquet of flowers from an unknown admirer.
#10 - Love on the Rox
Season 7 - Episode 6 - Aired 12/3/1992
Kelsey represents a man who wants to prevent his ex-wife from implanting the frozen embryos that they created during their marriage; Taylor stumbles in her first unsupervised appearance in court opposite Romney, but manages to get back on track with McKenzie's help; Rollins gets a surprise when he finally meets the landlord of the South Central apartment he rented to establish residency during the campaign; Mullaney agrees to father Melman's child; another present that's accompanied by a creepy note and a man who's watching her in the courtroom leads Taylor to suspect that she's being stalked; Markowitz confides to Benny that he damaged the house by firing his gun and then lied to Kelsey about the incident.
#11 - Bare Witness
Season 7 - Episode 11 - Aired 2/4/1993
Taylor is haunted by nightmares of Salerno; Brackman represents the owner of a gentleman's club charged with indecency by the city; Markowitz comes through on the stand against his attackers at the preliminary hearing; Salerno tricks an unwitting Stulwicz into aiding her campaign of terror against Taylor; Beatrice Schuller gains control of World Wide Studios, tap dances all over Flicker, and makes Becker an offer he can't refuse.
#12 - Say Goodnight, Gracie
Season 6 - Episode 22 - Aired 5/21/1992
Jonathan dumps Zoey; the Brackmans decide to reconcile and remarry; Victor Sifuentes returns to reclaim Van Owens' hand; Zoey's decision to advance her career by perjuring herself on the stand has tragic consequences when her testimony tips the scales in the case of a former inmate who sues the federal prison system after he contracts AIDS from a prison rape; Roxanne learns a hard lesson about Becker's selfishness and lack of responsibility when they discover that one of his former lovers is dying from AIDS.
#13 - Beauty and the Breast
Season 6 - Episode 20 - Aired 5/7/1992
Frank is fired for his role in destroying Becker's case; C.J. represents a movie executive who's being sued by an actress for insisting that she get breast implants that later proved faulty; Zoey faces off against a jailhouse lawyer in the trial of a convict accused of murdering another inmate, and unwittingly helps to shape her adversary's future; Sarah comes running to her father when she has an argument with Karen over her new, older boyfriend, leading to fireworks among the women in Markowitz's life; Bloom hides her true feelings about the future of her marriage from her new groom.
#14 - Silence of the Lambskins
Season 6 - Episode 19 - Aired 4/30/1992
Mullaney works with a feisty young prosecutor when he takes an out-of-town assignment as the lead prosecutor in the case of a missing woman presumed murdered by her co-worker during a theft from the bank where they both worked; Markowitz represents a condom manufacturer whose flag-emblazoned wares were seized by Customs under federal obscenity laws; Becker's representation of a woman with Alzheimer's whose daughter is vying for conservatorship rights with her mother's much-younger new husband gets torpedoed by Frank Kittredge when he leaks Gwen's pillow talk about the case to the woman's daughter, with whom he's also having an affair; Zoey wonders about the future of their relationship when Jonathan considers whether to accept the offer of a short-term appointment to the city council that could lead to a long-term future in politics.
#15 - TV or Not TV
Season 6 - Episode 2 - Aired 10/17/1991
Van Owen elicits emotional testimony from Elsa Chandler; the Government's handling of the MIA issue following the Vietnam War comes under fire in a family feud over a presumed-dead Air Force captain.
#16 - Christmas Stalking
Season 7 - Episode 8 - Aired 12/17/1992
Kelsey represents Markowitz in court and gets the charges suspended with Mullaney's support; suspecting that Morales may be her stalker, Taylor gives him the cold shoulder until Melman sets her straight; Paros wins her child abuse case with a little behind-the-scenes help from McKenzie; after Becker gives Flicker an ultimatum about Schuller, Flicker arranges for Becker to be carjacked and abandoned in the desert, where he comes to the rescue and offers Becker a ride home and a high-level job at the studio; a caring physician uncovers that the cause of Markowitz's strange behavior is a brain cyst that can be treated with medication, and he's released from the psych ward of the hospital; after Brackman coldly rebuffs the partners' gift of a new pocket watch, Lincoln finally offers up the original, to Brackman's joy and relief; Romney unsuccessfully pursues both Taylor and a job at the firm; Mullaney and Melman ride out a few rough patches on the road to parenthood.
#17 - Where There's a Will
Season 7 - Episode 14 - Aired 2/25/1993
McKenzie pursues a witness who could re-open Osgood's case; a murder-for-hire case involves Paros with a family friend; star-crossed lovers cross literary swords in the courtroom.
#18 - Odor in the Court
Season 7 - Episode 9 - Aired 1/7/1993
Becker realizes why Flicker has kept Schuller on ice when they finally come face-to-face; Paros returns a favor to McKenzie by calling in a favor with the State's Attorney's office on the Osgood case; Brackman's playing with pheromones in an effort to revitalize his sex life gets him and the firm embroiled in two lawsuits; Morales represents a man suing the owners of a slaughterhouse who have set up business next to his weekend getaway home in the desert; Mullaney feels responsible for the mob violence that follows when he fails in his efforts to pull out all the stops in keeping a mentally ill man who murdered his wife from being released from a psychiatric facility; Gwen receives another package from her stalker.
#19 - Dummy Dearest
Season 3 - Episode 6 - Aired 12/15/1988
Rollins represents a man who, after a devastating childhood trauma, can only talk through a caustic dummy, and is charged with assaulting the police officer who confiscated the dummy after being subjected to a storm of verbal abuse; Becker sets up Kelsey and Markowitz with a baby broker; Kuzak is subpoenaed to testify in the Mathers fraud case; Kelsey represents an actress suing a tabloid for printing lies which caused irreparable damage to her reputation and career; the firm loses a major client after the disciplinary board of the state bar slaps Kuzak with a public censure and a one month suspension.
#20 - Vowel Play
Season 5 - Episode 6 - Aired 11/29/1990
Douglas appears on Wheel of Fortune (daytime version) & when he's champion, he tries to ask Vanna out on a date. He wins one round with the puzzle, ""Bald Is Beautiful""!
#21 - L.A. Lawless
Season 7 - Episode 1 - Aired 10/22/1992
McKenzie, Brackman restructures itself into a leaner, meaner firm with the arrival of new partner Daniel Morales and the departure of Grace, C.J. and Susan Bloom; after a harrowing encounter with a dissatisfied knife-throwing client, Becker swears off marital law and vows to make entertainment law his new specialty; Gwen begins her internship and expresses an interest in the widowed Daniel and his baby daughter; Zoey is released from the hospital, but not from the guilt surrounding the shooting; Becker represents an actor suing his amusement park employer for unlawful termination; as the 1992 Los Angeles riots erupt, Brackman is mistaken for a looter and arrested, while Markowitz sustains severe head trauma after being dragged from his car and beaten by an angry mob.
#22 - Hello and Goodbye
Season 7 - Episode 13 - Aired 2/18/1993
A widow charges a news photographer with encouraging her late husband's suicide; Mullaney maintains a vigil by his father's hospital bed; and authorities are summoned to locate baby Lucy.
#23 - There Goes the Judge
Season 5 - Episode 20 - Aired 5/2/1991
An eccentric judge loses his grip on reality; Rollins gets caught up in his own agenda while defending a black motorist charged with evading the police; Becker grapples with his demons.
#24 - From Here to Paternity
Season 6 - Episode 16 - Aired 3/26/1992
The partners disagree about Van Owen's defending a celebrity baseball player on rape charges; DePalma becomes embroiled in a sting operation on a corrupt judge; Markowitz offers Sarah a job at the firm despite Kelsey's reservations, then tries too hard to win her affections; Roxanne moves out after Rayburn deceives her about Becker's fidelity.
#25 - Armand's Hammer
Season 5 - Episode 4 - Aired 11/8/1990
Holloway takes the stand; a savvy lawyer, C.J. Lamb, gets wise to the firm's strategy in a lawsuit; a college professor claims he was publicly humiliated on a TV home-video show.