Canterbury’s Law: Baggage
By fred | March 18, 2008
(S01E02) I didn’t like the pilot so much, but I didn’t find it completely repulsive either so I came back this week, good soldier, hoping that the show would have improved. It’s not that it was bad, more that it was nothing new. After having seen the pilot you felt like you had just watched yet another hour of a legal drama like there are so many, like you’ve seen so many already, and you wondered why.
Why did you watch it again, because even if you hadn’t really, it felt like you’d seen it before. And why would they do yet another show like that ? You know what, last season Fox introduced a new show, and then took it off the air without even airing the last episode made, ever. The show was a legal drama as well, it was called Justice and it was great. And I’m still pissed that it’s gone!
The only thing that makes it easier for me, is that I now know it had to happen for Rebecca Mader to find her way to Lost (where she plays Charlotte). I do like her and her character, I’m happy she join, so I understand Justice had to go. What helps also is that episode 13, the one that never aired, wasn’t that good. But that doesn’t change the fact that it was a great show, it really was. It was, the the first few episodes were terrible !
All followed the same formula, it was like watching the same episode over & over again, scary shit. But then it got better, and soon enough they were winning at times, loosing at others, and regardless of that sometimes their client was guilty, sometimes he was not. We know, because every episode ended, after the verdict, with the actual truth.
So the show wasn’t just like any other legal drama. Not because there was wining and loosing, for both innocent and guilty people, but also because (a) it loved to play with how media got involved in the actual case, and could influence things, and (b) we had the little twist of the truth at the end. Not much, but enough to make the show different. Canterbury’s Law, to be back on topic, lacks such a thing. There’s nothing to really differentiate this show from any other legal drama.
Once again this week we had Canterbury herself taking the case no one wanted to take, because she defends the poor. That, and also she found a way to somehow once again connect this new case with the disappearance of her own son. And the show went on to really insist on that, on how she was affected by it. All those long and useless scenes to let us know how bad she feels about it, how much it hurts.
Not only that, but she blames herself for looking away during a few seconds, the seconds during which her son was taken away. She feels responsible, no matter what anyone can say or do trying to help her, so her only way out is to loose herself into drinking, and work. That’s why she drinks most of the night, and works non-stop, it helps her to not think about it.
And none of that is new, none of that really grabs your attention. Neither does they rest of her team, because just as last week except for handing out files and answering the phones, that team is non existing, except for Russell Cross.
Another episode went by, and there isn’t much to say about it, because we had pretty much seen it before. The guy that no one will believe but our good lawyer, who will doubt him for a moment before proving he was indeed innocent, and the murderer was no other than the gold old doctor. We’ve seen this before, more than once, and this show didn’t really bring anything new to the table.
To be honest, the only thing I did like in this episode was somewhere else. Okay, so maybe I could have read the credits for upcoming episodes or something like that, but I had not done so. (And I still haven’t.) So I hadn’t realized that we would see Terry Kinney - who will always be McManus to me - some more, I thought he was here for the pilot and then bye-bye, but he was back this week and that was a nice surprise.
Apart from that, this doesn’t really do it. And so far, she always won her cases, and her clients were always innocent. I sure hope this will change, but it doesn’t do well and it may not really have time to…
Posted in Reviews
Shows: Canterbury's Law
