If you wonder what a super-liberal dreams at night, you can now watch each week on NBC. "Outlaw" refers to our hero Cyrus. Picture Tony Stark at the beginning of Iron Man - completely copied here in the pilot episode - the drinking and gambling in the casino, right down to the confrontation with the politically-opposite heckler outside laced with sexual double-entendres - and then bedding her. The script must have been laying around somewhere and they mixed them up. But it's the politics that shine here - heck, I lean to the left but this was just embarrassing. The staunch conservative Supreme Court judge who "deep in his heart knows he's wrong" (an actual quote from his dead father). Of course he has an epiphany and forsakes the Dark Side. And just when you think it can't get more over the top, it does. Every cliché imaginable is thrown into this mess, starting with the standard death-row inmate whose attorney through the entire long high-profile case was completely incompetent; the evil legal system that just wants to railroad him; even glimpses of the slimy Godfather-like powerful conservative Senator who's pulling the strings. We end with the surprise witness who was in hiding that makes all the bad right and everyone leaves smiling. If you aren't laughing at that point you don't appreciate the absurd.
There's a lot the writers want you to swallow, mostly with Jimmy Smits, who you have to buy as a womanizing ("I don't even know the names of the last three women I slept with"), bookie-fearing ("It's not half a million like the papers say, more like a quarter million") Atlantic City-loving playboy who was confirmed as a right-wing Supreme Court Justice. Right. His Dad (who is the voice that haunts him) marched with Cesar Chavez and publicly called his kid a schmuck. Happens all the time. For the most part his fellow crusaders are all straight out of the book, but my favorite is Carly Pope's Lucinda, a sexy, edgy legal private eye carbon copy of Kalinda of "The Good Wife" (Lucinda, Kalinda - you'd think they would have at least changed the name a bit more). But where Archie Panjabi's Kalinda is played with texture and nuance mixed well with self-assured aggression, Lucinda is overblown, tight-leather-clad, and sluttish - at one point telling us how nice her boobs are. C'mon, folks. When it was finally over my wife (who is normally very patient) turned and looked at me with a twinkle in her eye saying "OK, it's really stupid, but I still like Jimmy Smits". I told her to go find a "Cane" DVD and at least enjoy him in something creative, because this sure isn't it.
