Strip Law Strips Other Law Shows for Parts

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Netflix’s animated comedy Strip Law, which premiered on February 20th, packs a lot of humor into its ten episodes. Created by Cullen Crawford, a former writer for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the show follows the chaotic antics of a Las Vegas law firm named Gumb and Flambé. It feels like a mix of other comedies – the clever, self-aware stories of Community, the bizarre and unpredictable logic of BoJack Horseman, the quick, unexpected jokes of 30 Rock, and the spot-on parodies of early Childrens Hospital. Trying to blend all those influences into one show is already a big challenge. But the season finale, “Finale: A Show About Lawyers,” takes it even further. Strip Law completely transforms into a different fictional show called Pringus & Bench, and by fully embracing its quirky style, it highlights what makes the series truly special.

Strip Law follows Lincoln Gumb (Adam Scott), a lawyer struggling after being fired from his family’s firm by a colleague of his late mother, Steve Nichols (Keith David). Now running a failing practice with his rebellious teenage niece, Irene Gumb (Aimee Garcia), and an odd, disgraced lawyer named Glem Blorchman (Stephen Root), Lincoln realizes his traditional approach isn’t working in the flashy world of Vegas courts. Desperate for a solution, he witnesses Sheila Flambé (Janelle James) performing captivating street magic and believes combining her showmanship with his legal skills could be the key to turning things around.

In the second-to-last episode of the season, Gumb and Flambé go to an awards show and meet Pringus and Bench, two popular lawyers voiced by Joel McHale and Ikechukwu Ufomadu. These new characters initially seem like a quick gag referencing the 2010s TV show Franklin & Bash. However, the end of the episode features a teaser promising a major event. It announces that after ten years of winning cases, wearing stylish clothes, and getting into mischief, Pringus & Bench are retiring. The next episode then surprisingly shifts focus, beginning not with Gumb and Flambé, but with the law offices of Pringus & Bench.

Pringus & Bench is a legal comedy that playfully embraces familiar tropes of the genre. The show consistently finds humor in these clichés, as seen in episodes like “The Bad News Bapples,” which parodies the story of a workaholic lawyer forced to coach a kids’ sports team as punishment. (One character exclaims, “You kids are starting to crack my tough façade!”) Another episode, “Glemtastrophe: Anatomy of a Glemsaster,” features a lawyer saving a town from an environmental crisis, similar to Erin Brockovich, with a comedic twist – the town’s water supply is laced with alcohol, causing everyone to be constantly drunk. The season finale, “Finale: A Show About Lawyers,” fully leans into the show’s silliness, complete with a dad-rock theme song, characters who only speak in quick, witty lines, and a shared office desk with a playful ‘bro hole’ for passing props between colleagues.

As the final episode of the series, it opens with Pringus and Bench preparing to part ways. Bench is marrying his former paralegal and will soon become a Supreme Court Justice, while Pringus is moving to California to open a law office combined with a live music venue in Malibu. They only have one case left to solve before they can start their new lives, and they’re confident they’ll win – they’ve never lost a case before. However, things take an unexpected turn when they discover they won’t be facing their usual rivals in court, but Gumb and Flambé, in a case involving a dangerous gadget called Toilet 2 that causes comas and memory loss.

The story begins when Irene, impressed by the lively atmosphere at Pringus and Bench’s workplace, switches from working with Gumb and Flambé to become an intern for their rivals. On her first day, she laughs uncontrollably at everything Pringus and Bench say, revealing just how unoriginal their jokes actually are. Later, Pringus and Bench cordially invite Lincoln, Sheila, and Glem to Bench’s bachelor party, where our heroes get them extremely drunk and subject them to wild experiences that ultimately ruin the wedding. By the time they lose the case, Pringus and Bench are so disheartened that they willingly use a special toilet to erase their memories and start over with new lives. It’s as if years of pretending to be unaffected finally crumble after just one encounter with Gumb and Flambé, causing the world of Pringus & Bench to fall apart.

What really makes this show work, for me, is how consistently it experiments with form. It’s not afraid to get weird! Throughout the first season, Strip Law suddenly shifts gears – sometimes it feels like a mockumentary, other times like one of those clip show episodes, remember the brilliant “Paradigms of Human Memory” from Community back in 2011? Irene actually asks Lincoln, “Why is everything we do always so high concept and wacky?” And honestly, that’s a good question. It seems like all this wild experimentation is building toward a finale that can just completely dismantle everything we think we know about legal dramas. But Lincoln’s response is perfect: “Why wouldn’t it be?” It’s a show that embraces the unexpected, and I’m here for it.

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2026-03-06 21:54