And for poor, ratings-starved NBC, “Harry’s Law’’ only promises to bring more sorrow down upon the struggling network. It’s getting hard to watch NBC stumble mid-stumble, which, to get all “Inception’’ about it, was a mid-stumble mid-stumble. I suspect the execs took on “Harry’s Law’’ for the same reason they took on J.J. Abrams’s “Undercovers’’ — not because the show was good but because the executive producer was prestigious and powerful. Nope, not a great way to revive a network, picking programming based on labeling rather than content. The half-baked “Undercovers’’ lasted 11 episodes; “Harry’s Law’’ has a similarly uphill battle.
The show has been self-consciously built for the recession, with a noble hero who literally comes to the rescue of a poor, starving old lady with bronchitis and no health care. It’s meant to be a smile upon the needy, but it all feels painfully condescending and simplistic. Bates plays Harry — Harriet Korn — a weary patent lawyer in Cincinnati onto whom a suicidal kid jumps from a window. She saves his life, and he saves hers — spiritually, that is. How Kelley is that? She instantly becomes a do-gooder, exorcising her guilt for making so much money by opening a criminal-law firm in a bad neighborhood to usher the neighbors — gangbangers, hookers, Chinese laundromat owners — through the justice system.
Harry’s faux gritty office, in which we see her shoot a rat next week, quickly becomes another Kelleyesque nexus of semi-craziness, as her light-headed assistant Jenna (Brittany Snow) sells shoes out of the storefront and fellow lawyer Adam (Nate Corddry) struggles to be a better person and not hit on the young female clients. I’m not sure which is harder to watch — the forced eccentricity of the shoe sales or the lapses into teary earnestness as everyone tries to be a better person. As the curmudgeonly Harry begins to connect with “real’’ people and find her heart, you may find yourself wishing she’d just buy a new pair of shoes instead. That way she can walk all the way back to her high-rise patent-law practice on the other side of town.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. For more on TV, visit www.boston.com/ae/tv/blog.
