No ‘Justice’? Why a CBS Hit May Be Canceled : Television: David Letterman takes over the time slot of the popular series this summer. In the meantime, the action show will get a prime-time tryout, but a regular spot is remote.

Sometimes the acting is kind of crummy. Sometimes the stories are filled with gaping holes. Sometimes a car explodes off camera to save the expense of actually blowing up a car. But “Dark Justice,” made on the cheap on a sound stage in the San Fernando Valley, has become one of the most successful action shows on TV since “The A-Team.”

In Spain, Greece, Germany, even in China, the show attracts rabid fans. And as the Friday night caboose in CBS’ late-night “Crimetime After Primetime” series, it’s pulled respectable ratings against “The Tonight Show,” often beating Jay Leno in such big cities as New York, Philadelphia and Chicago.

Despite that pedigree and the big profit potential overseas of an action show made for about half the cost of an average prime-time drama, the “Dark Justice” set in Chatsworth might go dark for good. “Crimetime” will be displaced at 11:35 p.m. on CBS by David Letterman, probably by August. The series will continue in reruns at 12:35 a.m. following Letterman, but the audience available at that later hour is too small to sustain even the modest costs of these shows. (Letterman’s contract with CBS also includes an option for him to develop his own 12:30 a.m. show.)

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In the meantime, “Dark Justice” will get a prime-time tryout this summer with a two-hour movie version of the series, in which Bruce Abbott stars as a judge who works within the judicial system by day and then exacts his own kind of vigilante justice at night.

A regular prime-time gig on CBS, however, is remote. Rod Perth, CBS vice president of late-night programming, said that the prime-time commitment was made before the Letterman deal in an attempt to give the “Crimetime” shows some added exposure.

Jeff Freilich, the creator and executive producer of “Dark Justice,” thinks CBS is “crazy not to try it” for economic reasons.

The problem with action shows, once a staple of prime time and now practically extinct, is that they became too expensive to produce and their value in syndication collapsed. Half-hours became the rage.

“But now we have a glut of comedies and a dearth of action shows,” Freilich said. “I was in Spain and they are showing such old shows as ‘Starsky & Hutch’ because the syndicators have run out of product. No one is making them because the networks dropped their license fees and the studios don’t want to produce them at big deficits, even with this new demand. We can make this in prime time for $700,000 an episode. That’s 1970s prices. The network could pay for it and the studios would make big profits in off-network sales.”

Freilich said that he’s made 66 episodes of “Dark Justice” on a budget of about $500,000 each. He said he was a producer on “Battlestar Gallactica” when it cost $1.4 million per show in 1979.

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The lower budget means working fast--four-and-a-half day shoots per episode compared to the usual eight days for most prime-time dramas--and sacrificing expensive guest stars and exotic locations. “A scene that takes place at Dodger Stadium becomes a close-up against a gray wall,” joked supervising producer James Cappe.

Even so, Freilich said, “we have more action on this show than on any show since ‘Miami Vice.’ In just the first hour of this two-hour movie, we have a bank vault blowing up, a car swerving and plunging over a 100-foot ravine and eventually exploding, a chase between a van and a motorcycle, a shootout and two fistfights.”

The real savings, he said, come from underpaying--at least in TV terms--himself, the producers, writers and actors. Freilich said that on most series, about 50% of the budget goes to the producers and actors and 50% into the actual production. On “Dark Justice,” more than 70% of every dollar goes into the filmmaking.

“I created the show and I make half of what I was making years ago as executive producer of ‘Falcon Crest,’ which I didn’t create,” Freilich said. “But my feeling is that if I can continue to work like this, it may be the future of the industry, or maybe I can at least save a genre that I particularly like. I’m not a half-hour comedy writer, nor do I really like nighttime serials. I like hard-edged, off-beat action shows.”

Like all of the “Crimetime” shows, “Dark Justice” was designed to draw male audiences in late night with an extra dose of action and curvaceous female flesh. But the biggest appeal of this show, all involved agree, is the high concept of an avenging angel with a double life.

Abbott plays Nick Marshall, a long-haired, embittered judge who broods constantly over the murder of his wife and daughter. In his job--his hair pulled back, his scholarly wire-rimmed glasses sitting straight--he adheres to the letter of a legal system that often allows heinous criminals to go free. By night, however--with a band of three colorful sidekicks--he lets down his hair, rides his Harley and avenges evil by hunting down those he can’t put away in court with convoluted sting operations.

“It’s the answer to ’60 Minutes,’ ” producer Cappe said. “You see some guy on ’60 Minutes’ getting away with murder and you get pissed off and you can’t do anything about it. Well, our show shows you people doing something. Getting even. It’s a great escape.”

The series has its fans. “Dark Justice” clubs--composed mostly of middle-age women who, Freilich said, are attracted to the idea of a man who leads a double life while retaining an undying devotion to his dead family--have bloomed around the country. These devotees trade tapes, get together for slumber viewing parties, talk plot twists over computer bulletin boards and besiege CBS with letters.

“We get an extraordinary amount of mail,” Perth said. “We will have some very upset people if it goes off the air.”

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While awaiting that decision, Freilich is keeping his production team together with work on an ABC pilot, “Against the Grain.” He said that his primary hope for “Dark Justice” is not with CBS, but either as part of a Warner Bros. consortium of prime-time action shows that air on independent stations or as a first-run syndication offering, like “Baywatch.”

“I don’t think this show would have ever been bought for prime time three years ago,” Freilich said. “But with violent carjackings and the like becoming an everyday occurrence, there is an incredible numbness in our society to violence, and that generates a feeling where we really yearn for the superheroes of our youth.”