“You start watching this TV show with your skull full of MUSH!!”

Sometimes a television show will sneak up on you … and as you watch it, you immediately get hooked into the program and all its intricacies.

And that happened to me in 1978, when The Paper Chase debuted on CBS.

The series was set on the 1973 motion picture of the same name, and John Houseman – who earned an Oscar for his portrayal of acerbic professor Charles W. Kingsfield, Jr. in the original movie – reprised his role for the TV series.

The show featured James Stephens as Minnesota-born first-year law student James Hart, who takes Kingsfield’s class on contract law as part of Hart’s full-rounded legal curricula. After a major mistake on his first day in class (Hart thought the first day would be a lecture, while Kingsfield had posted the reading materials to prepare for the first class), Kingsfield ceremoniously shuns Hart, metaphorically eliminating him from future classroom participation. It’s only after Hart convinces Kingsfield that Hart really IS determined to absorb all that Kingsfield can teach, that the professor restores Hart to classroom participation.

But because this is the top law school in the nation – where graduates become Supreme Court justices and heads of major Wall Street firms – Hart pairs up with several other students as part of a study group. His initial classmates include the legacy-driven Franklin Ford III, ladies’ man Tom Anderson, working stiff Willis Bell, and social justice warrior Elizabeth Logan, who all share their outlines and notes so that they can absorb as much legal knowledge as possible.

But along the way, the show does feature the pits and perils of university life. One person in the study group drops out after a cheating scandal. Another member is sexually harassed by a professor. Franklin Ford’s father drives him to near madness to continue the legacy of great Ford lawyers. And Willis Bell’s work on a property law outline seems to run throughout the entire series.

The program only ran on CBS for one season, but four years later, the show – with Houseman and Stephens, along with some of the other cast members – re-appeared on Showtime for another three seasons, including a graduation episode.

And … holy crap … I just discovered that ALL 58 EPISODES of this program – the CBS and the Showtime runs – are available on YouTube.

Yeah, the first-season episodes can get a tiny bit preachy, and there’s a lot of “hey, isn’t that so-and-so” in the cast (Marilu Henner appears in the pilot as a pizza waitress), but the storylines are captivating, and the legal study in the show is pretty damn deep. Heck, the show even references famous legal cases, and not just made-up names to sound important.

Example. The show’s pilot episode discusses the case of Hawkins v. McGee, 84 N.H. 114, 146 A. 641 (1929), a real case where a doctor promises to repair a boy’s burned hand with a skin graft, only to graft skin from the boy’s chest onto the hand – resulting in a poor skin graft with a resultant hairy hand. Apparently this case is extremely important in contract law legal studies, and Hart’s fumbling ignorance of the case immediately puts him in Prof. Kingsfield’s cross-hairs. This is good stuff.

As I said, the entire four-season run of The Paper Chase is on YouTube. I’m going to need a few days to watch all of them.

But you know I will.