TV: Shark

Hey, remember when I said that Justice seemed to be lifting its characters straight out of House? Well, that was before I saw Shark, which reaches whole new levels of character-set theft.

Once again, we have an acerbic, blunt professional with an attractive, multi-ethnic team of support staff/professionals-in-training, and (unlike Justice) Shark even gives him an ineffectual female authority figure who can't control him at all.

Our hero (?) is Sebastian Stark (James Woods), a brilliant defense attorney who gets an acquittal on charges of attempted murder for his wife-beating client, and then (having apparently never seen a single episode of any TV legal drama from the last 20 years or so) is shocked when the thug kills her a few days later. His epiphany leads him to the Los Angeles District Attorney's office, where he agrees to head the new high-profile crimes unit.

That means he's now working for his old foe, District Attorney Jessica Devlin (Jeri Ryan); most of their interactions consist of Stark boasting about his prowess -- legal, intellectual, sexual -- and Devlin looking as if she's just stepped in something slimy. Ryan is one of those actors who was perfect in their breakout role -- as the Borg who wants to be human again on Star Trek: Voyager, her stiffness and icy demeanor was just right -- but now that she's being asked to play an actual person, it's becoming clear that she wasn't playing stiff and rigid, she just is stiff and rigid.

There's a team of four or five Junior Lawyers appointed to assist Stark. They are uniformly uninteresting and personality-free, to the extent that I can't even remember how many there are, or which stock characters are represented among them. I think there was a Snooty Rich White Girl, and maybe an Ex-Jock Striving For Respect, and it's Los Angeles, so the Latino Guy from East LA is obligatory.

The other regular character is Stark's 16-year-old daughter, Julie (Danielle Panabaker), the only actor who comes close to holding her own against Woods. It's not much of a role; she's there solely to give Stark a hint of humanity. Aw, he loves his daughter, he can't be all bad!

In the lead role, James Woods plays the same character he always plays; he's an amoral sleazeball who'll cut any ethical corner to win. Woods is good at this character -- after 30 years of it, he ought to be -- but it's nothing we haven't seen before. Your fondness for Shark, I think, will be directly proportional to your fondness for Woods; there's certainly nothing else in the show that demands your attention. I'm not fond enough to keep watching.