TV Reviews : Judd Hirsch Excels in NBC Movie ‘She Said No’

The courtroom drama “She Said No” (Sunday at 9 p.m. on Channels 4, 36 and 39) is yet another TV movie dedicated to the proposition that, however heinous a sexual assault, there’s no rape quite like a follow-up rape via the legal system.

And for its first half or so, NBC’s “She Said No” is compelling just-say-yes melodrama--thanks to the casting against type of Judd Hirsch as a casual date-rapist who also happens to be a slick attorney, nearly the personification of the devil himself as he puts the legal screws on his two-time victim.

This great stroke of casting can’t make up for the slack writing that fills out the bulk of the sluggish courtroom sequences, unfortunately. In the earliest, most discomfortingly lurid scenes, however, drawing on his inherent likability factor, Hirsch is fascinatingly feculent, drawing a portrait of a sleaze whose nature is camouflaged first by gosh-golly sweetness and, later, by power and respect. It’s a genuinely creepy performance.

Also first-rate, Veronica Hamel stars as a low-level ad exec who meets Hirsch’s lawyer character in a night-school French class and accepts an offer of a ride home and then a drink. A stop by his office, ostensibly for some papers, results in rape, preceded and followed by a seemingly carefree Hirsch babbling most benignly in idiot-French--the movie’s most oddly horrifying moments.

With prosecutor Lee Grant on her side, Hamel presses charges, but a hung jury results in acquittal. Hirsch then files a civil suit against Hamel for libel and malicious prosecution, making the victim the defendant. The plot should really take off at this point, with Hirsch operating in his element in prosecutorial, Mephistopholean glee, but instead writer Michael O’Hara continues to focus mainly on the standard elements of rape trial dramas, plausibly but predictably.