James Woods is the reason to watch and nearly the only one. Ian Biederman puts a defence lawyer among the prosecutors, a good idea, and then hands him a weekly witness to break and a room of juniors who exist to be lectured.
Ian Biederman’s series starts from a sound idea. Sebastian Stark (James Woods) has spent a career getting the guilty off in Los Angeles, and after one acquittal too many he takes a job with the District Attorney, Jessica Devlin (Jeri Ryan), running a unit of young prosecutors on the cases the city is watching. Devlin hires him because he wins and watches him because she does not trust him, and that is most of the tension the series is prepared to offer. The pilot, directed by Spike Lee, sets all this out with more snap than anything that follows it.
Woods is the whole case. He talks fast, thinks faster, and plays Stark as a man who has never lost an argument and has given up pretending to be modest about it. The scripts hand him rules to bark at his juniors, and he delivers them as if he has been waiting years for someone to write them down. We laughed out loud at his first briefing to the unit. Then we noticed the series wanted us to admire the man rather than watch him, which is a different and duller thing to ask of an audience.
The people around him are given less to do than a jury. Raina Troy (Sophina Brown) is the one junior allowed to answer back, and Brown makes the most of it. Madeleine Poe (Sarah Carter), Casey Woodland (Samuel Page) and Martin Allende (Alexis Cruz) take notes, run errands and learn lessons, and the investigator Isaac Wright (Henry Simmons) turns up when a door needs opening. Ryan is sharp in her scenes with Woods, but the writers, Ken Woodruff, Gary Glasberg, Michael Oates Palmer and Kevin Falls among them, give Devlin one note, wary, and ask her to play it weekly. Danielle Panabaker’s Julie is the exception. Her scenes are the only ones where Woods lowers his voice, and they are quietly good, though the show treats home as the place the plot goes to lie down.
The cases are the problem. Each 45-minute episode runs the same track: a crime, a suspect the unit cannot pin, a piece of gamesmanship from Stark, and a witness who comes apart under a single question. Chris Willingham cuts the courtroom scenes to Woods’s speed, which is the right choice, but the reveals are built for pace rather than sense. By the middle of the first season we were watching the last ten minutes with our arms folded, knowing which question would do it and roughly when. We were bored, and a series about a man who is never boring should not manage that.
The model is plain enough. A brilliant, rude specialist surrounded by pupils is House with a briefcase, and House worked because the puzzles were as good as the rudeness. Here they are not. The premise also has a gap the series never closes. A defence attorney who knows exactly how the guilty walk free ought to have something uncomfortable to say about the people who now employ him. Mostly he just plays the same tricks from the other table, and nobody on his new side of the aisle seems to mind.
It ran for 22 episodes from 21 September 2006 and a shorter second season of 16 from 23 September 2007, and it does not change much across them. Brian Grazer produces, and the polish shows: the offices are handsome, the pace never slackens, and the guest stars are of a decent grade. It is a well-made machine for delivering James Woods to your living room once a week, and if that is the order, it is filled.
Watch the pilot. Lee gives it a bit of grit and Woods gives it everything. If you want more after that, there are 37 further episodes that are more of the same at the same length, which will be either a comfort or a warning, depending on how much of Sebastian Stark you can take before you start siding with the defence.
