Meta: Grad School's Just Like That (How to Get Away with Murder s1)-- DFvQ

[xandromedovna]

How to Get Away with Murder (HTGAWM) premiered when I was halfway through my Master’s. Watching this directly after Community, I’m noticing that many of the shows I’m studying are set in schools: Community (undergrad), HTGAWM (grad), Glee (HS), Teen Wolf (HS), MPGiS (HS). TGP technically isn’t but Chidi does essentially open an ethics school for the other characters, so yeah, a little less than half of these shows are themselves about education. I think that’s partially why I connect to these shows, being an academic, but also schools are often elegant settings for writers because of the built-in constraints/obstacles, especially high schools, which are often highly regulated. Need to delay your character? Sorry, they’re still in “History of Ice Cream”. Need two random characters to have a reason to interact? They have AP Biology together. Need to nerf your characters so they can’t help the protagonist with the A plot? Time for the bar exam! The rhythm of the academic calendar, which often aligns rather neatly with the broadcast television season (historically September to May with a break for the winter holidays), is a comfortable entrée into the story world for me as someone beholden to that regime of time.

 

Besides the fact that everyone on Tumblr seemed to love it and the title was intriguing, what spoke to me about HTGAWM when I first watched the pilot was that it felt like a cross between Legally Blonde (2001) and Pretty Little Liars (2010-2017). The show opens with Connor, Michaela, Laurel, and Wes covering up a murder, but most of the episode is actually them trying to impress Annalise, a no-nonsense law professor who hires them to work on a case even though they’re 1L. They even do the scene where Wes is called on the first day of class having not done the assignment everyone else magically knew about, complete with vocab lesson about mens rea. Wes tends to be referred to as Waitlist for the rest of the season, despite being just as competent as the rest of the Keating 5 (arguably more competent, because in the pilot he has to not only come up with his own argument but everyone else’s because he is called on last and can’t repeat an argument).

This culture of extreme competition, while likely accurate to law school and felt throughout grad programs to varying degrees, becomes very palpably unhealthy from the beginning. Annalise regularly expects her interns to skip their other classes, pull all-nighters, and forsake all other responsibilities to help her win her cases. A running gag throughout the show is Michaela desperately trying to cram some studying in 5 minutes at a time. However, they can’t even really draw support from each other as a cohort because Annalise is constantly pitting them against each other. They’re all trying to earn the trophy, a heavy metal statue of blind Justice that allows them to get out of any exam in Annalise’s class, one-upping each other and showing off their prowess. The symbolism of the trophy being the murder weapon is telling—this culture of competition has literally killed someone, and now they have to work together to cover it up, even though they all hate each other. Throughout the rest of the series, they come closer together despite never fully trusting each other, irrevocably tied to each other through the trauma bond of their steadily increasing body count.

It's unclear when they find time to do their other coursework, and the answer revealed throughout the rest of the series is that they don’t; by the time they graduate, most of them are at the b—well actually half of them are dead or in hiding—but Michaela and Connor are at the bottom of their class because of all the murder. Between Annalise’s constantly fluctuating reputation, their single-minded dedication to her law practice, and the emotional stress of the increasing body count, they find it extremely difficult to maintain a competitive GPA, secure internships, or fulfill requirements. The ‘why this group’ of HTGAWM is that usually the Keating 4 are at the top of the class every year, but in this cohort’s batch, there are five of them and only two even graduate. One thing that’s never quite explained is, if every year she takes on a batch of 1Ls, why does she continue with the same group the whole series? Either there’s only openings on the Keating 4 every three years or the K5 has disrupted the whole system so thoroughly that they are also the last batch. In some way this is an artifact of Annalise switching structures to a clinic model starting in s3, which in a sense opens up the K4 to become a much wider group, but her favouritism to the K5 and Gabe are palpable.

One thing I think the airing schedule of the series obscures despite the frequent timecards is just how much is packed into a semester for them. Each season is one semester, meaning the audience is aging twice as fast as the characters; two years worth of plot points for us is just one year of their lives. The deeper into the conspiracy they get, the more jarring the return to mundane academic concerns like finals, course registration, or the bar exam, although these become significantly less mundane given how they add to the dramatic tension. And grad school is hard; there’s added responsibilities, higher expectations, less structured guidance, and an almost impossible work-life balance in the best of programs. And from what I understand, law school is particularly difficult because of how absurd the legal system is. Frankly I’m impressed any of them graduated.

But while on the one hand this show is a very particular view of five or six students’ unique experiences of law school featuring significantly more murder, on the other, grad school’s just… like that. No idea what’s happening at any given moment? Unrealistic expectations about work-life balance? Trying to set yourself up for career success in addition to program requirements? Disincentivized solidarity between cohort members? Unclear program completion milestones? Being fucked over by departmental politics beyond your control? Navigating strong personalities that assign your grade? Increased isolation from family and friends? Dubious compliance with union rules, assuming their grad students are even unionized (it’s the States so unlikely)? Frequent mental breakdowns? Exaggerated, perhaps, but sounds about right.

(For legal reasons this is a joke.)