LOS ANGELES _ Caitlin McGee, star of the new NBC legal drama "Bluff City Law," says she disappointed her father by being born on Jan. 9.
"He wanted me to be born on Jan. 8 because he is a big Elvis fan," she says with a smile.
The Elvis connection now goes even deeper: McGee's new series is set in Memphis, Tenn., and will be filmed there. McGee plays Sydney Strait, a brilliant lawyer who once worked for her father's (Jimmy Smits) law firm that was famous in Memphis for taking on injustice. After not speaking for years, Sydney is pulled back home when her philanthropist mother dies. Despite open emotional wounds, Sydney agrees to rejoin the family practice.
The cast of "Bluff City Law," scheduled to debut Monday on NBC, also includes Scott Shepherd, Barry Sloane, Michael Luwoye, MaameYaa Boafo, Stony Blyden and Jayne Atkinson.
Part of the family law practice deals with the music business, opening the door for a possible storyline connected to Elvis. Such a story would fit with what McGee sees as the focus of "Bluff City Law."
"There are so many things we could tackle, but the thing I think we really want to do is represent Memphis in every sense of the word from barbecue places to Graceland," McGee says.
Setting the show in Memphis not only gave McGee an Elvis connection but ended up being a real plus with locations. The Tennessee city has not been used in a lot of TV or film projects, so there aren't a lot of soundstages. That forced the production team to use more actual locations for filming and in the process give the city more exposure.
The only thing that won't be a reminder of the location is McGee's lack of a Southern accent. The Boston resident made a conscious decision not to play the role having an accent because her character would have done anything she could to distance herself from her family. McGee plays Sydney as a Vanderbilt graduate who is relatively worldly and doesn't want to be pigeonholed.
"Bluff City Law" has tested her acting skills, especially in the courtroom, where pages of dialogue have to be delivered. Those scenes feature so many characters that filming each angle makes the process even longer. She credits the strong writing with making her job of learning the lines the easiest part of the filming process. Her previous credits include "Modern Love," "Stan," "Plus One," "Chicago Med," "I'm Dying Up Here," "Falling Down" and "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel."
If McGee runs into any problems, two lawyers from the Memphis area are serving as advisers on the series. McGee has found so far that in general, a lawyer is basically the same, no matter if they are from Chicago, New York or Memphis. There is one element that a Memphis lawyer has that those from other cities would not.
"The biggest thing I felt was that small-town feel," McGee says. When she would walk around the Memphis courtroom with the advising attorneys, everyone knew their names." McGee suspects that kind of link to the community might not be as prevalent in a larger city.
The small-town world of "Bluff City Law" will be a combination of family and courtroom drama. The father-daughter relationship will be filled with tension because while the pair may disagree on many things, they both share a passion when it comes to the way they deal with battles at home and in the courts.
This is a series that focuses on a profession that is often the punchline for jokes.
"Bluff City Law," McGee says, will be a reminder of the good that can actually be done.
"We need that idealism. We need that hope. We need to know about the cases where people do prevail against big business, big companies, stuff like that, like the little guy really wins. So without it, it would be incredibly dark," McGee says. "Obviously we're a law show. We don't always win. I wish we would, but we don't, and so I think it's really important to show the human stories behind those headlines.
"I think that's the biggest thing that we see right now is we read a headline, and we don't actually get to know the people behind these cases and these stories, and it makes you even more passionate for change when you know who's behind that."
