The Good Wife 2.0

Pilot review: Outlaw

This is a show about a notoriously conservative Supreme Court Justice, Cyrus Garza, who decides to resign and become an extremely liberal pro bono lawyer. So pretty much completely ludicrous. However, it stars Jimmy Smits so it's basically candy for all the old people mourning the loss of regular Law & Order. He also has a team of two lawyers that were his aides at the Supreme Court, a public defender, and a "hip outsider girl" P.I. The public defender is also super-ACLU-ish, one of the aides is openly in love with Garza, and the P.I. and the other aide have a "banter" that consists of her saying things that would only be considered scandalous by the aforementioned Law & Order fans and him being completely aghast at her brazenness. Also, some unidentified people seem to be keeping tabs of Garza. And Melora Hardin (Jan!) shows up inexplicably for about a second.

This is a procedural and one that's not particularly interesting to me as it is excessively lawyer-y, so I won't be watching it again. But in terms of how it might fair for the network...well, I really have very few thoughts.

What it has going for it:

• Jimmy Smits: Like I said, bait for old people.
  
• Carly Pope and Jesse Bradford: They're the P.I. and the aide, respectively, with the banter I mentioned before. I felt like it got old practically before it started, but also seems like the kind of thing that'll be appealing to the L&O folks.
  
• RZA!: Okay, so he was only in the first episode and his presence might not really be appealing to the target audience, but I was amused.

And against it:

• The title is way more exciting than the show.
  
• It's basically The Good Wife. Public figure. Scandal. Lawyering.
  
• The courtroom stuff was pretty boring, not to mention preachy, and I can see where it would get monotonous quickly.

Possible common elements:

• It has that "hip", snarky, outsider girl thing in common with Hellcats.
• And shady people spying on the main character like in Nikita.
• Older guy with a gambling problem, or who sleeps around, or maybe just middle aged bachelor might come up again this season.
  
• He has a fancy Philadelphia brownstone, but unlike characters in other shows so far, it seems like he could reasonably afford his.
  

I think that's kind of it.