Via the indispensable NewsBusters, even USA Today can’t carry this much water:
There’s awful, and then there’s atrociously, hilariously awful — a line NBC and Jimmy Smits soar across with Outlaw. A gambling, womanizing, conservative Supreme Court justice who chucks the court to become a crusader for the outcast and oppressed? That’s not a prime-time show, it’s a Saturday Night Live sketch.
—–
Preposterous to a painful degree, Outlaw is a vanity-show concept only an actor could love. Who wouldn’t want to play a larger-than-life devil on the outside/saint on the inside who’s worshiped and adored by the right-thinking and loathed and feared by evildoers? If only Smits had noticed that his playboy card-shark jurist was a dramatic contradiction in terms: a sanctimonious sinner, an intolerably smug one to boot.
We meet Smits’ Justice Cyrus Garza as he’s being thrown out of a casino for counting cards. Outside, he stops to debate a case he’s due to decide with a pretty ACLU protester (because you know those justices, yak, yak, yak) — whom he then beds. But her words move him, and he resigns to become a trial lawyer. ….
Tonight’s case involves a wrongly accused condemned man. Friday, when Outlaw moves to its regular slot, the case involves racial profiling and Arizona’s immigration law. But the dull, preachy process doesn’t vary: Know-it-all Cyrus rides in, uncovers the truth and saves the day with a show-stopping speech as the camera lingers lovingly.
Read the full review here, and our friends at NewsBusters have much more.