The Golden Age of Drama Is Now

Noted film director Sidney Lumet returns to the small screen tonight with a fine legal series--”100 Centre Street” on A&E--that; often matches the very best of the golden age of U.S. television that gave him his start. What goes around does come around.

Conventional wisdom in some quarters is that TV has never lived up to the promise of its so-called Camelot youth, roughly the 1950s when, as deeply inscribed legend insists, the blooming infant medium yielded a panorama of spring flowers, each brighter and more fragrant than the next.

Oh, sure.

Talk about your senior moments. The fable of that somehow being the “Golden Age of Television”--setting lofty standards since unmet--rises either from amnesia or selective memories.

Not that this parcel of New York-based live TV didn’t shimmer with creativity on occasion, from the brilliance of Sid Caesar and his comedy writers to such weekly anthologies as “Studio One” and “Playhouse 90,” on which a young Lumet and other theater-bred talents made their early marks. A few of these antique television plays--such as movies-to-be “Marty” and “Days of Wine and Roses”--remain stunning even today despite being hampered by rudimentary technology.

The very newness of television was stimulating then. For every highlight, however, there were clunkers galore. What’s more, this was also the television of near-monolithic whiteness, pervasive quiz shows, cookie-baking sitcom moms, 15-minute newscasts, sponsor influence on content and incidious blacklisting. Plus, no Monday night football!

Besides, the golden age of TV drama is now.

That is affirmed by “The Sopranos” on HBO, “Law & Order” and “The West Wing” on NBC, “NYPD Blue” on ABC and, well, you name it, recent past and present.

Also by “The Warden,” a coming TNT series pilot with Ally Sheedy, and especially by “100 Centre Street,” which Lumet created initially for NBC before getting this 13-episode shot from A&E; as its first series. Its title is the address of New York City’s criminal courts building, its neighborhood a warren of intriguing, morally ambiguous story arcs spanning an ensemble of distinctive characters headed by a pair of judges played beautifully by Alan Arkin and LaTanya Richardson.

Much of today’s TV mirrors the madly formulaic, twisted, sensationalistic universe that writer Paddy Chayefsky foreshadowed 25 years ago in one of Lumet’s best movies, “Network.” Yet “100 Centre Street” is the antithesis of that, mingling compassion and cynicism in calibrating itself to the rhythms of a night court’s assembly line of human wreckage.

Justice noir? Not quite. Bobby Esposito (Joseph Lyle Taylor), a complex, likable assistant district attorney featured here, gets to the heart of “100 Centre Street” in wanting to narrow the gap he sees separating law and justice on this conveyor belt that at times appears to serve neither the public nor the accused.

Although “100 Centre Street” is sometimes funny, its tone is generally somber, its courtroom sequences gray and unglamorous, from Judges Joe Rifkind (Arkin) and Attallah Sims (Richardson) barking out seamless legalese (“What is your plea to the two-twenty eighteen and the twenty forty?”) to ugly encounters with criminal defendants that are uncomfortably real.

When a convulsing drug addict rolls rigidly on the courtroom floor, a bailiff tries to stop her from swallowing her tongue, then curses her when she bites him because she may have AIDS. “I hate this job,” he says.

Loving this job is Rifkind, an ex-cop and famously lenient jurist his critics have nicknamed “Let ‘Em Go Joe.” It’s his story that dominates the excellent double-sized two-hour premiere written and directed by Lumet, as one of his rulings backfires tragically, bringing down on him wrath from multitudes that include the police and his political hack of a boss.

“Your bleeding Jewish heart is gonna drop you in it one of these days,” his close friend, Sims, a conservative hard-liner nicknamed “Attallah the Hun,” earlier had forecast prophetically. Sims is a grand figure, instantly one of the strongest African American presences in all of TV. Despite their clashing judicial philosophies, she stands by Rifkind when he’s attacked, in effect becoming his protector, their scenes together as comrades especially memorable.

As is Arkin when Rifkind learns of the “terrible blunder” he has made, sitting quietly, mouth pinched, arms tightly folded, offering nothing overt, his subtle body language only hinting at inward pain and churning emotion. It’s part of a stellar directing effort by Lumet and a controlled, understated performance by Arkin that ranks with his best.

Also prominent tonight, in addition to Esposito, are his romantic partner, Cynthia Bennington (Paula Devicq), a new assistant D.A. whose old-money looks and Godiva blond hair contrast strikingly with his own dark earthiness. Esposito is a most interesting character, reluctantly putting himself at great risk tonight on behalf of his weak, self-pitying, sad-sack of an ungrateful older brother (Tony Gillan), whose drug addiction comes to roost most heavily in a commanding Episode 3.

By far the weakest of these initial episodes is the second, introducing skirt-chasing Legal Aid attorney Ramon Rodriguez (Manny Perez), whose costly inattention to a defendant ultimately becomes as belabored here as his betrayal of his wife and child.

Mostly, though, “100 Centre Street” is highly admirable. That includes the cast’s fine work, and also conversational scenes in distinctive Episode 3 that evolve so naturally--and unusually for this medium--that you can’t imagine them elsewhere in mainstream TV.

If that’s not golden, someone is color blind.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted by e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.