TV is the New Reading

‘Canterbury's Law’ entertaining,

but somewhat disappointing

The series premiere of “Canterbury’s Law” finds defense attorney Beth Canterbury, played by Julianna Margulies, conducting an affair with a consultant on an ongoing case she’s defending.

What follows that opening scene is a cynical commentary on legal ethics, media relations and domestic bliss. Canterbury is a sharp public defender who has surrounded herself with a former assistant district attorney, an up-and-coming associate and a not-quite-credentialed de facto paralegal.

This reminds me of “The Practice,” and not just because Margulies resembles no one so much as a female version of Dylan McDermott. Rather, the writing and pacing seems trapped somehow in the ‘90s. The character development is dense and unnecessarily complicated, even for a pilot episode, while the case she’s defending is terrifically facile.

Dylan – I mean, Canterbury – has a client who’s been accused of kidnapping and murdering a child. Remains of the child surface in a place where her client may have been and the grieving parents are incredibly sympathetic.

Apart from being generally out of it, her client is on antipsychotic medications and the prosecution is tying a lot of its case to a confession made while these meds were being withheld. Already that seems to negate any value it might have, but on top of everything else, the reason he’s even on the meds in the first place seems at least in part to be that he will say creepy, incriminating things and it’s hard to tell when he’s kidding.

She ultimately prevails, but only because the father of the child lashes out at her in court, punching her in the face and displaying the kind of impulse-control issues she’d been imputing to him throughout – that he’d been an abusive father, despite everyone Canterbury’s associates talked to affirming that he was not.

But when it was suggested that his child disabled the security system himself so as to escape the father chasing him down in the night and beating him to death, that seemed to the jury to have the ring of truth to it and they ultimately acquitted Canterbury’s creepy client.

The involvement of Denis Leary (”Rescue Me”) as an executive producer explains a few things – especially how everything was resolved with a punch to the jaw in open court. I’d complain about how facile and skin-of-its-teeth the defense was – especially given that if the father hadn’t lashed out the case could still have gone either way – but that’s not how legal dramas are written. Even “Boston Legal” producer David E. Kelley maintains the trappings of an over-the-top legal firm mostly as a setting in which to spout political rhetoric, and “Eli Stone” is set in a law firm only because it is not set in an asylum.

In the end, when everything is about personalities and spectacle, the writers rarely have to base anything on anything, and case law goes flying out the window.

Entertaining? Perhaps. But disappointing all the same.

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

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