The long legs of the law. / Miranda Penn Turin/FOX
Julianna Margulies returns to series TV tonight in Fox’s Canterbury’s Law (is it just me or does that title sound Canadian?), a legal series that you might call Damages times Rescue Me minus the good writing. From my review-blurb in this week’s Time:
The season of the Flawed Woman (Damages, Rescue Me) continues with Julianna Margulies as an adulterous, ethically challenged defense attorney–and mother of a missing son. Margulies vanquishes her ER heroine image, but bad dialogue (“When she crosses a line, she does it for her clients”) and dull legal stories undermine her case. C
Actually, that’s the entire review. The show’s from Rescue Me’s Denis Leary and Jim Serpico, and you could imagine any number of ways it might have gone better: if it had gone more boldly for Leary-esque comedy-drama, if it had been on FX or another network that didn’t seem so hesitant about showing a sympathetic but self-destructive character, if it had paid a little more attention to Elizabeth Canterbury’s dialogue than to her legs (left). But it didn’t, and what we end up with is an average-at-best legal drama with a lot of elements that never quite come together.