Deadlocked: How America Shaped The Supreme Court is a four-part docuseries, directed by Dawn Porter (John Lewis: Good Trouble), that examines the history of the United States’ highest court, starting from the time Earl Warren was appointed as Chief Justice by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953. The series goes all the way up until the present day, when a 6-3 right-leaning majority shaped by President Donald Trump has overturned some of the precedents the court established over the previous 70 years.
Opening Shot: Earl Warren, then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, receives an honorary doctorate from Rutgers University in 1966. “I like to think of the law as a shining, concentrated light,” he tells the commencement crowd.
The Gist: The goal of the series is to show how prevailing issues and attitudes among the US’s citizens as well as lawmakers influenced how various presidents appointed justices, but also how those justices ruled.
The first episode concentrates on the Warren court, which he presided over from 1952-69. While Warren was appointed by a Republican president, he was a progressive Republican (yes, those did exist at one time), and he was determined to have the Court adjudicate civil rights cases and overturn rulings from the past that should no longer stand as precedent, like the Dred Scott case and Plessy vs. Ferguson.
The biggest case his court ruled on was one of the earliest, Brown vs. Board of Education, which overturned Plessey‘s notion that Blacks and whites were “separate but equal”. Other rulings followed, including ones that gave people arrested by law enforcement expanded rights (Miranda vs. Arizona). Much of it, in Warren’s view, was to bring attention to rights that should have been legislated into place, but weren’t.
As his tenure went on, the Court’s rulings did influence President Lyndon Johnson to sign the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, then appoint Thurgood Marshall first as his Solicitor General, then as the first Black Supreme Court justice.
But, as the experts interviewed point out, many legislators and state governors, many of whom were Southern Democrats (yes, Democrats!), constantly fought back against these rulings, citing the erosion of their version of an ideal society. It was white supremacy, pure and simple, but as the “law and order” presidency of Richard Nixon began and Warren retired, those voices were starting to win out over the more progressive ones.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The first episode of Deadlocked could certainly dovetail with Porter’s aforementioned biography of John Lewis, as well as a few other films she’s done.
Our Take: The perspective of Deadlocked: How America Shaped The Supreme Court isn’t necessarily the history-making cases the Supreme Court heard and ruled upon, it was more about how the justices — and the presidents that appointed them — reacted to the shifting social tides in the US. Porter does an effective job of making sure the series is about the people in and around the Court, which gives viewers a chance to connect to the justices in a way that we don’t often see.
Let’s face it: Even now, the Supreme Court justices are generally seen as a series of black robes and written opinions. It’s not like they don’t do interviews, or make speeches, but the most we tend to learn about any of them happens during their confirmation hearings, and only if those hearings are contentious, like we saw with recently-appointed Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
With Earl Warren, the episode takes a pretty detailed look at just what motivated him to steer his fellow justices towards certain cases and rulings, and how the court turned its eye towards civil rights during his tenure. The experts interviewed seem to think that not only was events happening in places like Topeka, KS (the Board of Education in the Brown ruling) and in the South driving this, but the rulings of Warren’s court pushed the Black population to be more forthright in standing up for their rights, because they knew they had the support of the court.
But as we’ll likely see in the rest of the series, those forces don’t sustain indefinitely. As the mores of our country shift, so does the political viewpoint, whether they’re in sync or not. We’re looking forward to seeing a deeper examination of how the court started leaning right, especially in the Reagan years, then went to more neutral during the years of Clinton and both Bushes, then became a bone of contention between the Senate and the executive branch in the Obama years. Will we get upset when we get to the Trump administration and see how he was able to get three conservatives to get to the current 6-3 configuration? Maybe. But we’ll sure has heck get a lot more context around how those chips fell.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Richard Nixon is sworn in as president by Earl Warren in 1969.
Sleeper Star: John W. Marshall, Thurgood Marshall’s son, is interviewed, and he gives some great perspective on the responsibility that was laid upon his father, first arguing before the Court in representing the NAACP and others in civil rights cases, then as both Solicitor General and a Supreme Court justice.
Most Pilot-y Line: None that we could find.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Deadlocked: How America Shaped The Supreme Court isn’t meant to be an exhaustive history of our highest court, but it does give a great perspective on just how the court went from ruling on civil rights cases in the ’50s to its conservative turn in the 2020s.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.