Review: Channeling Adult Swim, Netflix's 'Strip Law' gets crude in the courtroom

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“Strip Law,” a new cartoon premiering Friday, finds Netflix in an Adult Swim state of mind, which is to say there was no thought of it being made for everybody.(Possibly including some of the people it was made for.) It’s rude, lewd, surreal in a banal sort of way, at times ridiculously violent — that is, the violence is ridiculous.It was the cast that attracted me: Adam Scott, once more the schlemiel as leading man; Janelle James, sure of her own magnificence, not far from her character on “Abbott Elementary”; and Keith David, whose deep, sonorous voice is almost necessarily one of authority, turned to good or evil or in between as the script demands.

James and David, especially, I could listen to for days.Created by Cullen Crawford, (“The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” “Star Trek: Lower Decks”), the series is centered on a failing Las Vegas law firm, headed by Scott’s Lincoln Gumb, with James as Sheila Flambé, “a magician and three-year all-county sex champion” he hires as his “co-counsel in charge of spectacle.” Niece Irene (Shannon Gisela), an iron-pumping 16-year-old, works as his investigator; she wears a blindfold labeled “Underage” whenever she’s required to be in a bar.Stephen Root plays his disbarred (later undisbarred — rebarred?) lawyer uncle, Glem Blorchman, the strangest of them all — “It’s 115 degrees out so I put marshmallows in gin,” is something he says as they gather to watch Christmas movies.

And David plays Lincoln’s nemesis, Stevie Nichols, the very successful former partner of Lincoln’s late mother, upon whom the son remains perversely fixated.Much of it is the sort of thing that will work or not work depending on your mood, but generally I prefer the small throwaway jokes to the big gross ones.There are self-reflexive meta gags about “hard-working cartoon writers” and “reappropriating out-of-dat...