The Whole Truth

Oh The Whole Truth, we barely knew you. I don’t blame you, you were well written, well acted, and a solid show overall. I blame the networks for piling Wednesday night with 3 legal dramas in the same 10pm time slot. Of course at least one was going to fail. What was the logic behind that? Of course the dull and moronic Law & Order: LA was going to get picked up no matter what with SVU as a lead in. The Defenders is a surprising ringer in this category, I have yet to watch it so I can’t really comment on it except to say that I don’t think I could buy Jerry O’Connell as a deceitful lawyer. And then we get back to The Whole Truth left out in the cold.

The one mistake I believe the show made was not having enough character development right up front. If you’re not Law & Order, and sometimes even if you are, you HAVE to have character development, that’s what the audience initially attaches to unless your procedural is SO fresh and new (like CSI back in the day) that the format trumps everything else. Rob Morrow’s “Jimmy” was a bit smarmy and frat boy like for my taste and was the polar opposite of Maura Tierney’s subtly played tough as nails prosecutor “Kathryn.”

The other major flaw, at least in the marketing of the show, was hailing it as a totally new type of legal drama. Let’s face it, it was trying to revive the very successful David E. Kelley legal drama The Practice. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It was a great, successful, dramatic show, but if you’re going to try what they did you HAVE to develop the characters as they did. That’s what made it successful.

Of course I wish that Maura Tierney’s return to television had been a spectacular hit, but she’ll be fine. She was carrying the show and deserves to be on a series that can challenge her and make her better, not bring her down.