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Julianna Margulies is probably best known for her Emmy Award-winning turn as nurse Carol Hathaway on television's long-running dramatic series ER, in which she played George Clooney's love interest and had a meaty role for six seasons.

Since then, the talented actress has appeared in a number of TV series and theatrical movies, most notably HBO's The Sopranos and, on the big screen, the laughably awful B-grade horror movie Snakes on a Plane.

Now she's traded in her scrubs - and her snakes - for a power suit and stiletto heels to portray a relentless defense lawyer named Elizabeth Canterbury, the lead character in Fox's new legal drama Canterbury's Law.

The series, which premieres at 8 tonight, is produced by Jim Serpico and Denis Leary, the same team responsible for Leary's darkly acerbic drama, Rescue Me, a well-crafted cable hit for four seasons.

ON THE AIR

• ‘Canterbury’s Law’ premieres at 8 tonight on WUPW-TV, Channel 36, in Toledo.

Margulies' character has the same brooding intensity as Leary's tormented fireman in Rescue Me. Both have an underlying sadness and can be bitter, temperamental, and explosive. And both possess a sense of morality that's, well, flexible, to say the least.

In Liz's case, she'll go to any lengths to prove her clients' innocence, and if that means bending the law, or even breaking it, well, that's evidently the price you sometimes have to pay to achieve justice.

In her personal life, Canterbury isn't exactly a model citizen either. Her relationship with her law-professor husband (Aidan Quinn) is strained to the breaking point, in large part because their son disappeared a few years earlier and the case was never resolved. She blames herself for the boy's apparent kidnapping and looks for solace in the bottle and in an adulterous relationship with a handsome private eye who is always on call, both professionally and personally.

Liz prides herself on being an aggressive advocate for those who are wrongfully accused. In defense of a client, she says, "I could love the person on the stand body and soul and still rip their throat out on [cross-examination]."

When she goes up against a crafty - and quite possibly crooked - deputy attorney general (Terry Kinney), she's not above crossing the line to win her case. In the premiere episode, she tampers with a jury and encourages a client to lie on the stand as a tactic to prompt prosecutors to call another witness, just so she can - you guessed it - rip his throat out.

In a future episode, Liz and a partner will impersonate members of the attorney general's staff to get to a reluctant witness.

There are a number of excellent dramatic series in recent seasons that feature strong female leads, among them The Closer, Saving Grace, Damages, even Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Sad to say, Canterbury's Law doesn't measure up to them.

That's disappointing, considering the pedigree of its creators and its director (Mike Figgis, who wrote and directed Leaving Las Vegas). The series is little more than a stock courtroom drama. Though she plays a basically unlikable character, Margulies does a fine job and is a pleasure to watch, but the smart, powerful, Rescue Me-type scripts just aren't there.

Some of the show's courtroom antics are silly, and the show even cheats by resorting to the old Perry Mason-like dramatic shortcut of having somebody on the witness stand break down under questioning and admit that yeah, they did it, and they're glad they did.

The fact that the series is airing at the relatively early hour of 8 p.m. probably won't do much for viewership, but Fox apparently doesn't have much confidence in the show anyway. It's been bounced around on the schedule, and though there were only five episodes completed before the Hollywood writer's strike, the network has yet to order any new ones.

It probably won't have to.

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