It's easy to dismiss 'Legal'
Just Legal
Starring: Don Johnson, Jay Baruchel
On: the WB, Channel 56
Time: Tonight, 9-10
You've still got to love Don Johnson's hairdo. It's a bit of a mess on his new WB series, ''Just Legal," but it's rock solid. Literally. It simply doesn't move, no matter how much the actor does. Farewell, ''Miami Vice" tease, hello mussed-up freeze.
But you don't have to love ''Just Legal," which premieres tonight at 9 on Channel 56. It's not imaginative or ambitious enough to be loved. It's a formulaic, lazily devised legal series that fails to surprise or amuse. In every episode, it replays the same game -- the same odd-couple team of lawyers, the same earnest cases, the same last-minute triumphs.
Johnson plays a cynical lawyer named Grant Cooper, although he has none of the charm of either of those screen icons. Grant bottom-feeds his way through his profession, alienating judges, drinking too much, chasing ambulances. The show doesn't make him into a tragic figure like Paul Newman in ''The Verdict," though, since this is lite drama. Instead, Johnson makes eyes at the camera as he finesses his way through the role of a boozing has-been. ''Just Legal" could have been his opportunity to show later-career chops as a man with moral self-loathing, or, alternatively, with comic self-irony. But he seems merely to float through the hour in second gear, along with the hair, always the hair.
Fortunately for all involved, Jay Baruchel is Johnson's costar. He plays Skip Ross, a wunderkind lawyer who can't get a job with a legitimate firm because he's 19. His only option is to work with Grant and get experience. Baruchel was appealingly geeky as the lead in ''Undeclared"; he turned nervous energy into a kind of undergraduate heroism. Here, he captures the same likable blend of innocence and offbeat pluck. He even makes Johnson more interesting simply by supplying colorful facial reactions.
Naturally, the two lawyers balance each other's weaknesses. Skip is bursting with the idealism that Grant has lost, and he inspires Grant to recover some of his dignity. Meanwhile, Grant, who admits ''I'm not a paper kind of guy," teaches Skip about the street side of lawyering. ''Just Legal" is certainly not an insult to our intelligence, like so many TV products; it's just not interesting enough to matter much.
