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"NBC's outlandish 'Outlaw' richly deserves death penalty"

By Douglas A. Berman

In part because the headline mentions the death penalty, and in part because it readily allows me (and perhaps others) to save space on my DVR, I had to link and quote this amusing review in USA Today about one of the notable new law shows premiering on network television this fall.  Here is the start of the review: Surely NBC's joking. There's awful, and then there's atrociously, hilariously awful ? a line NBC and Jimmy Smits soar across with Outlaw.  A gambling, womanizing, conservative Supreme Court justice who chucks the court to become a crusader for the outcast and oppressed?  That's not a prime-time show, it's a Saturday Night Live sketch. Preposterous to a painful degree, Outlaw is a vanity-show concept only an actor could love. Who wouldn't want to play a larger-than-life devil on the outside/saint on the inside who's worshiped and adored by the right-thinking and loathed and feared by evildoers?  If only Smits had noticed that his playboy card-shark jurist was a dramatic contradiction in terms: a sanctimonious sinner, an intolerably smug one to boot...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on September 15, 2010 (boomark / email).