NBC's 'Bluff City Law' to shoot in Memphis

The NBC legal drama "Bluff City Law" will be shot in Memphis, officials are expected to announce this week.

Shooting on the first season of the show is scheduled to begin July 22 and continue through October on an initial slate of 10 episodes. 

The outcome represents a major win for local and state film-production boosters and government officials, who have been engaged in many weeks of behind-the-scenes negotiating and finagling to keep the series in its namesake city, despite the financial benefits that would come from relocating to Georgia or Louisiana, states with more lucrative economic incentives for film and TV.

Remaining in Memphis also affirms the hopes of the show's creators. "The more we researched and learned about Memphis, the more it made sense to set the show here," producer and co-creator Michael Aguilar told The Commercial Appeal during the shooting of the program's pilot episode in Memphis in March. "The more time we spend here, the more excited we become about the stories we can tell."

Although those with inside knowledge of the network's plans caution that nothing is definite until parent media company NBCUniversal makes its own announcement, such cautiousness seems a formality at this point. 

The "Bluff City Law" production company reopened its Downtown office this week to begin pre-production planning. Meanwhile, the interior law office sets constructed for the pilot episode have remained intact, and are ready to be re-occupied by fictional Memphis legal lion "Elijah Strait" (Jimmy Smits) and his team of lawyers, paralegals and investigators.

A July start date means that "Bluff City Law" will overlap with the third Memphis-set Hallmark Channel romance, "Christmas at Graceland II," making for an unusually busy season of major professional film production in Memphis. To staff both productions, crew members from Los Angeles and Nashville will be needed to augment the city's relatively small population of experienced grips, lighting technicians, boom operators, set dressers and other film-production workers. However, "Bluff City Law" ultimately will give jobs to dozens of Memphis in various capacities.

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In fact, if "Bluff City Law" is a hit and is renewed for subsequent seasons, it would prove to be the most significant film or television project in Memphis history.

Not only would the city be promoted weekly to millions of television viewers, but the project would help build up an experienced local crew base and the type of infrastructure necessary to support major projects on a regular basis.

In addition, the $55 million that "Bluff City Law" expects to spend in Memphis on its first season would dwarf the amount spent here in the past on any past single film or television project. The previous record was $7 million, spent during production of the 1998 film "The People vs. Larry Flynt." The 2017 eight-episode CMT series "Sun Records" spent $6 million.

According to local officials, the decision to shoot "Bluff City Law" in Memphis was based on the city's appeal and various financial factors, and was not a response to the controversial "heartbeat" abortion bill recently passed into law by Georgia.

Nevertheless, NBCUniversal recently joined with some of the world's other dominant media corporations — Disney, Warner Media and Netflix — in suggesting that the Georgia law, which would ban abortions if a fetal heartbeat can be detected, could result in the company pulling the plug on productions in the state.

Thursday, NBCUniversal, which is owned by Comcast, released a statement in reaction to the Georgia law and similar abortion restrictions underway in other states. “We fully expect that the heartbeat bills and similar laws in various states will face serious legal challenges and will not go into effect while the process proceeds in court,” the statement said. “If any of these laws are upheld, it would strongly impact our decision-making on where we produce our content in the future.”

CBS, Showtime, AMC Networks, Sony Pictures and Viacom are among the other companies that have said they will take abortion legislation into consideration when determining where to produce future films and television programs.

Co-created by Dean Georgaris, who wrote the pilot episode and has been an enthusiastic Memphis booster on his social media accounts, "Bluff City Law" is "a character-driven legal drama that follows the lawyers of an elite Memphis law firm that specializes in the most controversial landmark civil rights cases," according to NBC.

The firm is led by a father-and-daughter team played by television veteran Smits and relative newcomer Caitlin McGee, whose decade's worth of credits include story arcs on "Grey's Anatomy" and "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel."

Considering his TV track record, the presence of Smits bodes well for the series' success. The 65-year-old actor seems to be something of a television good luck charm, with starring credits in "L.A Law," "NYPD Blue," "The West Wing" and "Sons of Anarchy."

Other regular cast members include Michael Luwoye (a Broadway "Hamilton" star), Jayne Atkinson ("House of Cards"), Barry Sloane ("Revenge"), Ghana's MaameYaa Boafo and young Icelandic rapper-turned-actor Stony Blyden (birth name: Thorsteinn Sindri Baldvinsson Blyden).

Set to debut September in the 9 p.m. time slot (Central Standard Time), "Bluff City Law" will be the first series produced by one of the historic "Big Three" networks to be based in Memphis since the short-lived "Elvis," an ABC series that was canceled after 10 episodes in 1990.

The hope is that the program will become a multi-season success like the last major Tennessee-set series, "Nashville," which ran for four seasons on ABC and two on CMT before its run ended in 2018.

"Nashville" was able to remain in its namesake city thanks to some $45 million in Tennessee Entertainment Commission grants and other state incentives — an arrangement that led to charges of Middle Tennessee bias, based on the fact that such should-have-been-Memphis productions as Craig Brewer's "Footloose" remake moved to Georgia when denied similar financial assistance.

Hoping to avoid a repeat of such apparent inequity, local officials and state entertainment industry representatives have presented a united front to keep "Bluff City Law" in the Bluff City. 

Memphis and Shelby County Film and Television Commissioner Linn Sitler, longtime Film Commission board chair Gale Jones Carson and other local government and business representatives traveled to Nashville repeatedly to meet with state financial gatekeepers in hope of securing special funding to meet the production company's requirements. According to Sitler, the production company has estimated it would spend $55 million in Tennessee while shooting its first season.

Reportedly, NBCUniversal was seeking $10 million above the state and local incentives already available for film production in Memphis — a drop from the $17 million to $18 million originally sought. However, the state budget that was passed by the legislature before the end of its most recent session did not include money for "Bluff City Law," meaning that subsidies may have to come from Gov. Bill Lee's office.

To gin up grassroots support, the Memphis and Shelby County Film and Television Commission encouraged visitors to its website to write the governor's office in support of "Bluff City Funding." Under the headline "We Need You!," the Film Commission posted this message: "Want the series shot in Memphis? In Tennessee? Write your state leaders — just say you want the series here! Jobs! Tourism! Weekly primetime network commercial for Memphis! $55 million in-state spend per season!!"

The City Council also voiced its support for subsidies, voting 10-0 on May 21 to ask the state to allocate the $10 million to keep "Bluff City Law" in Memphis.

Presumably, some sort of yet to be disclosed financial incentive plan has been worked out. Judging from the enthusiasm of the show's creators for Memphis, it's possible the production company accepted a lesser deal as a good faith gesture, with the expectation that financial incentives for a second season would be closer to the original request.