ABC's 'The Deep End': Because Television Needs More Attractive Lawyers

In ABC's The Deep End, a group of pretty young lawyers (pretty and young, not pretty young) doesn't have enough to do yet. (Bob D'Amico / ABC)

by Linda Holmes

ABC's new lawyer drama The Deep End aims to do for first-year attorneys what Grey's Anatomy did for young doctors: make it appear that they're incompetent, oversexed, and only occasionally capable of stumbling onto the right solution, mostly by chance. Lovable, though!

The show concerns the goings-on at a prestigious Los Angeles law firm where the terrifying Cliff Huddle (Billy Zane, who is, at 43, thank goodness now old enough to play powerful titans rather than pretenders like the twerpy villain in Titanic) is in charge. In charge, that is, until the return of partner Hart Sterling (Clancy Brown), who's been away for three years tending to his wife's medical needs but now is back.

That's right: Cliff Huddle and Hart Sterling. Would they not be obligated to start a law firm together, even if they weren't lawyers?

Hart is the conscience (or maybe semi-conscience) of the firm, while Cliff just runs around being called "The Prince Of Darkness" behind his back and plotting against women and children. No -- literally, the first case taken on by young attorney Dylan Hewitt (Matt Long, whom you probably don't remember from Jack And Bobby) finds him defending a woman and her child against the wicked machinations of, among others, Cliff. (Wondering how he winds up opposing his own boss? Oh, it's complicated, don't worry about it.)

More, after the jump.

Meanwhile, the other youngsters are also in up to their necks. Ambitious, privileged Beth Bancroft (Leah Pipes) is overseeing a complex transaction in which one of the parties may be losing his faculties; womanizer Liam Priory (Ben Lawson) has been misunderstood by a potential client in a storyline so idiotic I cannot bear to repeat it; and spunky Addy Fisher (Tina Majorino, who deserves better) is trying to figure out how to stand up to her terrifying boss, Susan Oppenheim (Nicole Ari Parker) -- who happens to be Cliff's wife. There's also a very quick appearance by another young, newly arrived associate, played by Mehcad Brooks of True Blood, but you won't find out much about him in the first hour.

Granted, one shouldn't expect too much from a show like this, especially in the pilot. There are a lot of characters to introduce, and some of the expositional dialogue can be given a pass, because the characters will presumably stop explaining their relationships to each other and their past history at some point.

But the signs are not good. For one thing, there isn't enough pop in the legal stories themselves. The A-plot -- the one with the wan mother (Meredith Monroe) and the little moppet -- takes a couple of random meanders before settling down for no apparent reason except that the episode is almost out of minutes. Beth's ethical dilemma is one-dimensional and relatively amenable to analysis in terms of existing ethical rules governing attorneys, which most attorneys actually would at least have a conversation about, and which, here, don't come up at all.

For another, the young lawyers aren't given much -- other than hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt -- to wrap their intensity around. They seem to be at this prestigious firm simply because it's a prestigious firm; they seem to be lawyers just because. There's a lot of churning worry about their professional futures, but mostly, it's an excuse to jump in what appears to be the swimming pool built into their favorite bar.

The Deep End was created by David Hemingson, who has worked on an interesting mix of shows, some of which are pretty good -- including How I Met Your Mother and Lie To Me. He started out as a lawyer himself, and it's clear that he wants to say some very specific things about the tendency of law practice to extract a high price from the very young.

Unfortunately, while there are some appealing actors here -- they don't make them much more appealing than Tina Majorino -- there isn't enough happening to them yet to make the show pop. There's no one as instantly watchable as Sandra Oh or Chandra Wilson in the opening episodes of Grey's, and there's no story as deliciously soapy as the early Meredith/McDreamy stuff. There's a development in the closing moments that has potential, but there are also several dynamics set up that seem like dead ends already, including a lifeless affair revolving around "low moments" and a damaged father-daughter relationship that seems to be based on damaged father-daughter relationships from other movies and television shows. ("You're weak and unreliable ... just like your mother.")

The Deep End isn't awful, really; it's just not doing anything yet as of the close of the first episode. There's the potential for Billy Zane and Clancy Brown squaring off to be a lot of fun, certainly, and a couple of the young lawyers can be charming. But with the basics of the exposition over, the case-of-the-week stories need to be better and the stakes for the characters significantly higher if audiences are going to pay any attention.