1x01 Pilot

Holy smokes, 2009 is actually a very long time ago. It's sometimes hard to tell at first glance - fashion has shifted shockingly less since the turn of the millennium than in most quarter-centuries of US history - but the flip phones! The sense that Googling counts as detective work! The flirty handsome boss played as charming and not creepy!

People have called this the "last great network drama" and on the one hand who cares what distribution channel funds a thing... but on the other hand I get it, this show presents as an extinct species. There are already a ton of ways this feels like a throwback to The Practice, The West Wing / other Aaron Sorkin shows, Boston Legal / Boston Public, ER - not surprising because there's a bunch of cast and crew overlap. "Great" is, I think, rose-colored glasses for those shows: despite how much love I have for them, and how much they stood out relative to other offerings of the time - film was still by far where the most interesting stuff was happening then. But there is a particular very late 90s/early oughts nostalgia itch this scratches despite the show arriving late in the oughts, it's working for me.

The pilot doesn't have to do a lot of work because I come in already in love with Julianna Margulies from ER and Josh Charles from Sports Night, and because Christine Baranski reminds me so much of Joan Rivers. The pilot tries to do WAY TOO MUCH work, though - we could have saved like seven character intros for later episodes, especially since we have to introduce the whole case-of-the-week guest star ensemble. Diane, Cary, and Kalinda all come across very one-note in this episode. But pilots are almost always really bad, and since this one is okay, I have high hopes.

I do not love the husband in prison as the critical-clue ex machina. The device strains credulity (how many cases can the county attorney for an area where 5,000,000 people live really be personally familiar with?) and it could get old really fast for key plot movement to come from the character we are least inclined to get close to.