Bull and Ensuring The Right Results
The moral case for finding a way to work the system until it does what you want.
We like when things go our way.
When we set out towards a goal and actually achieve it, that feels good. Life feels like it has an order to it and it’s going our way. Unfortunately, things don't always work out that way. Given the way chaos tends to come about in all kinds of crazy ways, we can't be sure that the world will go our way. So we have to find strategies and come up with plans which are more often than not going to lead to success rather than failure. We try to make it so that the world doesn't go off in weird directions. As long as you're not actually looking for that to be the way it ends up.
Of course, no one is more likely to be chaotic than human beings. They never do what you want them to even if it might benefit them. Human beings are the hardest to control no matter how much planning or rigging of the system you do to make it that way. Entire ideas about how to understand humans and get them to what you want exist for this reason. Hoping that if they push the right buttons or make the right call in the moment, everything will work out the way we want them to. Despite the way in which humans create chaos, things will end the way we want them to.
Nowhere do we want things to work out more than in the justice system. It's set up specifically to try and be as predictable as possible. Rules exist around how to act and who gets to decide what when someone doesn't act the way they're supposed to. All so that hopefully, justice is served and the process is maintained. Yet even with all these rules, the one thing that screws it up are the things which can't be controlled... people. No matter how many rules or judgments get made, the people factor can always screw it up. It's the fundamentally predictable reality of even the justice system that people will be unpredictable. People will say things on the stand that they didn't intend to. Judges will make decisions you don't want them to.
Bull is very much about wanting to try and control the outcome of this chaos. Dr Jason Bull, as played brilliantly by Michael Weatherly, is all about getting the right result in a court room. He's spent his whole life studying people and the way they think about things. He does this to make sure that the people on the jury are the kinds of people who will think the way he wants and feel the way he wants them to feel. But no matter how much he might do to try and fix the situation to his advantage, there are just things he can't control. He has a whole team behind him of lawyers and investigators and data scientists to make sure he knows the results before it happens, but he never knows for sure.
He does his best though and everything he does usually goes the way he wants. He's put in the work to make it happen and that helps.
Do yourself a favour and explore the difficulty of ensuring the right results by checking out Bull as soon as you can.
Bull is available on Paramount Plus as well as Amazon.
Season One was interesting. We've seen 5 episodes of Season 2 and are disappointed so far. Overly emotional. The science is barely there. Cast change doesn't work.
Neat write up.