Shark, starring James Wood, stars on Five tonight at 10pm. Photograph: Ron P. Jaffe/CBS
Legal dramas like medical dramas have, over the years, become so crassly formulaic I barely bother watching any of them now. Shark however, which starts tonight at 10pm on Five, looks likely to turn the genre on its head, doing what the Emmy award-winning House did for the hospital drama a couple of years back.
Shark concerns the solitary, heartless life of a cynical celebrity defence attorney who, disgusted by his successful defence of a wife beater turned wife killer, becomes a prosecutor. The part is played by James Woods, who over the course of his 35-year long career, has become exceedingly good at playing self-interested sleazebags. In fact, even when he has played a good guy (the journalist in Oliver Stone's Salvador or as a lawyer in the brilliant Indictment), he has done so in a way that manages to be both palpably creepy and inexplicably sexy. So it is with Shark. Within the first 10 minutes, Woods has delivered his causus belli: "One, trial is war. Two, second place is death. Three, truth is relative. Four, in a jury trial, there are only 12 opinions that matter. Five, your only job is to win. Justice is God's problem." This prompts his new female, and implausibly pretty, boss to complain: "To you, the legal process is just a game to be played for fun and profit." To which Woods snaps back: "You make that sound like a bad thing." As spoken by Woods, these words sound chillingly satanic. No wonder Disney had him as the voice of Hades in their animated movie, Hercules.
All of which had me reflecting upon why the legal profession - along with journalism and police work - is so universally despised but secretly admired. Whole sections of the publishing and film industry are devoted to exposing their tricks, scams and money grubbing activities. And yet ask any caring new parent what they would like their child to grow up to be and they will, likely as not, reply: "Lawyer." OK, so the money is good, but the profession, as seen in cinema and on TV, offers as much hope of redemption (Paul Newman in The Verdict, Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men) as it does of damnation (Robert Duvall in the Godfather, John Cusack in the Ice Harvest, James Spader whenever he plays a member of the legal profession).
Shark does the clever thing: it places the figure of the glib, complacent defence attorney among the stern, and frankly tediously moral, men and women of the prosecution and law and order. In other words, it puts the cat among the pigeons, and in doing so it not only revives a very tired genre, it reminds us who we would wish our children to be.
