The Whole Truth

The Whole Truth equals " Law & Order: The Next Generation." It's still just a little too overeager and needs to mature.

There's no skimping on the sordid and blunt evidence, but the cases are absorbing. And unlike "Law & Order," which had a way of leaving us hanging, we do learn the "whole truth" by the end of each episode. You can't put a price on closure.

There's some minor Rashomon-style point-of-view switching as the attorneys prepare their opposing cases each week, and never know who's going to win, which makes this a bit different, and a bit more intriguing, than many standard lawyer shows.

For the most part, the procedural material is boilerplate stuff we've seen zillions of times already on "Law & Order," with right turns and smoking guns and unexpected witnesses. The pleasure to be found on the show is in watching Tierney and Morrow riff off each other like very competitive tennis players.

I'm not yet crazy about the formula, but it's good to see Tierney back in a series and though Truth has a different look and feel than some of Bruckheimer's other series, the polish remains.

It's nice to see Tierney back on TV, but I secretly hope this Shakespeare-quoting crab of a lawyer is just a filler job until another Parenthood-esque gig comes along.

The Whole Truth gets a split verdict. Solid idea, inconsistent execution.

All their best scenes are with one another and have less to do with whatever case they're contesting than with their shared personal history--the characters are old friends, maybe lovers--and teasingly suggested future. The crimes, by contrast, are not particularly compelling, even when they are sensational, and feel invented merely to let the stars talk.

Tierney and Morrow are both seasoned TV stars, but even they can't make The Whole Truth ring true.

Where other law shows tend to have one side view the other as the embodiment of evil, here we see that these two are old friends from law school who enjoy the battle of wits even as they're convinced they're on the right side of every fight. On those occasions when The Whole Truth slows down to just let those two bounce off each other, it's a show I almost want to watch. But the rest of it is too fast, and too thin, to bother with.

Each warrior is given equal time and the evidence is piled up on both sides to maximize the suspense around the weekly suspect's guilt or innocence. But the personality cost is too high for the payoff.

The Whole Truth, which airs opposite "The Defenders" on ABC, is less lousy.

It's all very fast-paced but relentlessly and annoyingly simplistic, with virtually no dramatic nourishment along the way. The show's other gimmick is to add a reveal at the end of each episode to let us know who was really responsible for the crime and whether justice was served. In the two episodes I watched, can't say I really cared by the end.

Speed doesn't kill, necessarily, but it can't save weak material either. And after viewing the second episode--in which the defendant is a stripper and her sister a nun--let's just say there seems to be little danger of anyone succumbing to mental exhaustion in the writers' room.

Every point is hammered home with a complete lack of subtlety; during the closing argument in the pilot, bits of previous scenes were replayed at crucial moments, in case the audience forgot what transpired several minutes ago. It's always a good time when a television network assumes that you're a half-wit.

We cheered for Jack McCoy to convict the scumbag criminal on Law & Order and for Ally McBeal to speak out for the wrongly accused. Here, there are no easy answers, but the difficulty doesn't tax viewers' intellectual curiosity so much as their patience.

Without characters to rely on, the show tries to hook us in with legal twists and turns--evidence found, evidence in, evidence out. But even on that level, Truth falters. The only twists you won't see coming are the ones that make no sense