{alltv} NBC's outlandish 'Outlaw' richly deserves death penalty

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.

We meet Smits' Justice Cyrus Garza as he's being thrown out of a casino for counting cards. Outside, he stops to debate a case he's due to decide with a pretty ACLU protester (because you know those justices, yak, yak, yak) — whom he then beds. But her words move him, and he resigns to become a trial lawyer.

But not on his own. His team is made up of Al (David Ramsey), a defense attorney who is also his best friend; Mereta (Ellen Woglom), a law clerk with a ludicrous puppy-love crush; Eddie (Jesse Bradford), a conservative stuffed shirt; and Lucinda (Carly Pope), a brash private eye whose every other line is a badly delivered sexual invitation, insult or intrusion. It's as if Pope and Smits were in competition to see who could make their character more insufferably self-satisfied.

Tonight's case involves a wrongly accused condemned man. Friday, when Outlaw moves to its regular slot, the case involves racial profiling and Arizona's immigration law. But the dull, preachy process doesn't vary: Know-it-all Cyrus rides in, uncovers the truth and saves the day with a show-stopping speech as the camera lingers lovingly.

Not content to simply be stupid, Outlaw is more than a little insulting. Never mind the witless lack of respect for what the Supreme Court does and the people who do it. Do we really need another show promoting another shadowy, conservative cabal, this one with tentacles in the Senate and the court and an anti-Garza agenda? Art should say whatever it wants, no matter how controversial. Pop, procedural claptrap trash should be more circumspect.

Or just be laughed off.

Outlaw
* (out of four)
NBC, Wednesday, 10 ET/PT