TV: The Whole Truth (ABC, Wed 10)

"I've looked at law from both sides now..."

That's the conceit of this courtroom drama, in which we bounce back and forth between the offices of the prosecutor and the defense attorney before arriving at the trial in the final act.

For the prosecution, Kathryn Peale (Maura Tierney). She's a tough, no-nonsense broad, constantly barking at her multicultural staff of underlings.

For the defense, Jimmy Brogan (Rob Morrow). He's a lawyer with a heart, who spends a lot of time negotiating the disputes among his multicultural staff of underlings.

They're not only frequent rivals (and how is the show going to explain why this particular pair of lawyers keep coming up against one another in a court system as large as New York's?), but old friends as well, who studied for the bar together. There's a strong suggestion that they dated for a while, and it seems that the romantic tension never entirely went away.

The leads are reasonably well cast, though Tierney makes the stronger impression. Morrow has handicapped himself by giving Brogan a fast-paced speaking style that the actor can't quite handle; he often seems right on the verge of tripping over his own tongue.

The show's gimmick, which gives it its title, is the post-verdict coda, which reveals to us who the real culprit was. In the pilot, this scene was a bit frustrating, not because they'd failed to leave clues pointing us to character X, but because they'd never given X any motive, and they didn't explain to us exactly how X had done it.

The "here's what really happened" coda is a variation on a similar gimmick used in Justice, an earlier courtroom drama from producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who's also the producer here. The two shows also share actor Eamonn Walker, who was one of the sidekick attorneys on Justice and plays a similar role (in Tierney's office) here. They should have given the character the same name and thrown in a line about him having moved from Los Angeles; would have been a cute inside joke for the six people who remember Justice.

The tone and style are very straightforward, with not much room for humor, though perhaps future episodes will feature somewhat lighter cases that allow more of that. The Whole Truth is a perfectly acceptable courtroom show, but I didn't find anything in it that was unusual or distinctive enough to keep me watching on a regular basis.