An unlikely hero for the people

By FRANCES GRANT

Corporate lawyers and cute kids go together like sharks and seal pups. This is the novelty element of the latest in a long line of American telly legal dramas.

The Guardian, starting tonight, features a legal hero who, in the words of an inhabitant of another set of TV chambers, Ally McBeal's Richard Fish, is in the law to make "piles and piles of money".

Nick Fallin (played by Australian Simon Baker) is an extremely talented lawyer who is used to winning. He works for his father's firm. He wears expensive suits.

But Fallin has been a naughty boy and been busted for drugs. His punishment, as we learn in the first minute of tonight's double-episode opener, is to serve "1500 hours of community service as a child advocate".

Fallin is far more at home cutting tax breaks for multinational corporations and settling million-dollar deals with dotcom start-ups than dealing with wayward and troubled juveniles.

He is not pleased to be slumming it at custody hearings where dowdy and low-paid social workers feel free to make jibes about his expensive suit. His withering rejoinder: "I didn't say 'hey, you look like crap', so I would appreciate it if you refrain from beating me up for looking decent."

His first case as advocate for a boy who has seen his schizophrenic father murder his mother with a kitchen knife is far too raw for the besuited one and he flees the courtroom.

But a legal talent like this won't stay down for long. Pretty soon he's hatched a scheme to sue the drugs company that botched the murderous parent's medication.

Suddenly his social work has his associate, and the show's sex interest, Amanda Bowles excited. But Fallin makes his motto clear: "Make the money first, then go and make a difference."

The Guardian was the highest-rating new drama in its first season in the United States, where daring to go with an unlikeable lead is apparently something of a novelty.

By any other than American standards, however, Fallin ain't that bad. After all, he's handsome, a legal genius and, despite his air of disdain for low-income earners, not that mean to the winsome seal pups. He wants to make them money, too. Whether he's tackling the fat-cat capitalists or negotiating a child custody hearing, this is a man who likes a cut-throat deal and a win:win situation.

Although he's playing a Pittsburgh lawyer, Baker seems to bring a hint of Aussie larrikin to the role (perhaps it's the fluctuating accent and deadpan Crocodile Dundee gaze), which helps him to carry the show.

The drama's other characters and cases are standard issue: Dabney Colman plays Fallin's role-model father, Burton Fallin, and Alan Rosenberg is Alvin Masterson, the idealistic and equally authoritarian chief of the children's service unit.

The Guardian's creator, David Hollander, has said this is not so much a lawyering show as a character study. Whether Fallin's good guy well concealed in bad guy's clothing develops any real complexity remains to be seen.

In the meantime, the most intriguing thing about the drama is how it will negotiate its schizophrenic nature, shuffling between the gloss and bluff of the corporate world and the heart-tugging plots of the run-down public service.

* The Guardian, TV2, 8.30pm