Within the Law

At the end of the first season of A&E;’s gritty legal series “100 Centre Street,” executive producer Sidney Lumet went to star Alan Arkin to see if the actor had any story line suggestions for his character--the even-tempered Manhattan night court judge, Joe Rifkin.

“I did it for a specific reason,” explains Lumet, the veteran director of such classic feature films as “12 Angry Men,” “Network” and “Dog Day Afternoon.”

“One of the driving story lines--it is an internal story line--is the cost [the job] has to take in terms of the judges--the kind of internal exhaustion that must come from having to take on somebody’s life and the responsibility for somebody’s life,” says Lumet, who is writing and directing five of the second seasons’s 18 episodes.

“I had this idea that I wanted to get Rifkin somehow involved in a life problem that would be going directly opposite of his professional problems,” Lumet explains. Lumet discovered that Arkin had an interest in Zen Buddhism.

“So I invented the idea of [him having] a daughter who had been gone all of those years and all of a sudden, she’s back in his life and she has been a part of [Zen Buddhism].”

The series, which begins its second season Monday, chronicles the lives of the judges, prosecutors and advocates who toil at the overcrowded night court in New York.

Besides Rifkin being reunited with his troubled, long-lost daughter this season, the controversial and tough-minded Judge Attallah Sims (LaTanya Richardson) will continue to lock horns with lawyers and criminals. Lovers Cythnia (Paula Devicq) and Bobby (Joseph Lyle Taylor) have left the world of 100 Centre St. and have opened a storefront office handling pro bono legal cases.

Joining the cast are Bobby Cannavale as an aggressive young assistant district attorney and Michole White as a deeply religious legal aid attorney.

Lumet reports that there will be no mention in any upcoming scripts about the attack on the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11. “Our scripts are all set,” Lumet says. “There is no way you could address it without exploiting it. I don’t want to be topical. That is not what the show is about. There are other shows that do that. I hope ours is about a more complex aspect of the justice system.”

Arkin, who describes working with Lumet as a “dream come true,” is pleased that the series is airing on cable and not one of the five broadcast networks.

“One of the great advantages of doing it on A&E; instead of, [for example,] CBS is that they leave us alone creatively,” says Arkin. “They let us do the kind of shows we want to do and tackle the issues we want to tackle. If you know anything about Sidney’s career, he has extraordinary taste and he’s interested, I think, in important things and not in a sensationalistic way.”

“They have been absolutely wonderful,” adds Lumet about A&E.; “There has never been any restriction in subject matter or in the way we have expressed it.”

Though Arkin has found it easy to slip into the judicial garb of Rifkin, the gregarious Richardson has found the no-nonsense Sims to be a real challenge. “In one regard, I am like her, but in her total picture I am so not like her,” says the actress. “She is consumed with her job and her being a Republican.... It has been hard [to play her], but I have given in to her.”

Richardson has discovered that female judges have embraced the reality of her portrayal. “I was at [author] Toni Morrison’s birthday party [recently],” says Richardson, the wife of actor Samuel L. Jackson.

“Everybody who was anybody was there. This guy came over to me and said, ‘Do you see all of those women [standing over there]? They are all judges and they want to meet you.’ I went over and talked to them.”

They were eager to know how extensively Richardson researched her part. “I said I went to night court here in New York and night court in Los Angeles,” Richardson says. “Basically, I got a lot of my friends who are attorneys [to talk to me]. They said, ‘Trust us. You could be a judge any day you decide not to [act], or better still, if you went [to a courtroom], you could fake it and no one would know!’ ”

“100 Centre Street” can be seen Mondays at 9 p.m. on A&E.; The first episode is rated TV-14 (maybe be unsuitable for children under 14).