Midseason letdowns at the White House, the courthouse

Two higher-profile midseason series arrive tonight. Sorry to say, however, there’s nothing supreme about “Mr. Sterling” nor anything sterling about “Queens Supreme.”

“Mr. Sterling” opens with the death of a U.S. senator from California. Protecting Democratic Party interests, the state’s chief executive swiftly fills the vacant Senate seat with the son of a former governor.

Cynical formulaic politics keeping levers of influence in the family and the party?

Hardly, for true to his name in this simplistic, overcooked new NBC series, William Sterling Jr. (Josh Brolin) is as pure of heart as Jefferson Smith, the gleaming novice Jimmy Stewart played to the idealistic hilt in Frank Capra’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

Integrity flashing like a neon “Hotel” sign, Sterling turns out to be a politically androgynous threat to entrenched powerbrokers on both sides of the aisle. And yikes, on top of it all he shows disturbing signs of being a statesman. No patsy for special interests, he is so virtuous that he resists a lobbyist’s attempt even to buy him breakfast.

Unlike Stewart’s initially naive bumpkin, however, Sterling slams into D.C. with abundant swagger and savvy, amazing for a D.C. outsider who has been laboring in the boondocks of public life as head of a prison high school. Before tonight’s final credits roll, this UFO has Senate hotshots licking his loafers and his newly named chief of staff, veteran Jackie Brock (Audra McDonald), utterly awestruck by his walking-on-clouds act.

Talk about characters wearing halos, you get a sense early where this is going when the maverick Sterling keeps the Senate-seat-wielding governor (Bob Gunton) cooling his heels for 10 minutes because he refuses to let class out early. After he’s offered the appointment, he wonders: “Who would replace me at school?”

What planet did this guy beam down from?

The good-versus-evil theme that Capra ran up the flagpole so rewardingly in 1939 -- in a movie entrusting the nation’s ideals to an honest everyman with a good heart -- lands like a brick in 2003. The biggest issue facing Sterling when sworn in is a proposed capital gains tax cut. The biggest issue facing the show is credibility, especially when compared with the many layers of complex political infighting stripped back so interestingly in NBC’s much-superior political drama, “The West Wing.”

Brolin’s supporting cast also includes William Russ as principled legislative aide, Harris Yulin (also seen counseling the president on Fox’s “24”) as a powerful Senate committee chairman and James Whitmore as Sterling’s aged father, who gets around with a walker. Actually, this series may need a walker. Just as “Queens Supreme” gets old before its time in an opening hour that edges forward like an epoch.

Gravity and farce are no strangers to courtrooms. So there should be plenty for a “serio-comic” series from CBS to harvest when having its corps of eccentric New Yorkers -- led by Oliver Platt as Judge Jack Moran -- operate in Queens County Courthouse.

Unfortunately, neither the “serio” nor the “comic” amounts to much in the premiere of “Queens Supreme.” It’s a pointless, aimless, meandering mishmash of faux profundities and mostly humorless wisecracks knotted by a maudlin morality lesson, the entire jumble begging for a sharp crack of the gavel. Nor is there anything here that appears to distinguish this supposedly distinctive setting from, say, the Bronx.

Next week’s second episode is less mannered and more successful.

The cast is not the problem. Joining Platt as judges are Annabella Sciorra, Robert Loggia and L. Scott Caldwell. James Madio and Marcy Harriell play a pair of likable law clerks, and Kristen Johnson shows up as Moran’s estranged wife seeking his signature on divorce papers.

She’s his biggest headache tonight until he’s put to the test when a perilous courtroom crisis erupts during the jury phase of a civil trial to determine whether an elderly man died from the stress of withdrawal after he had entered a program designed to end smoking. Instead of sparks, suspense and nasty wit, this potentially combustible mix produces deadly talk, without clearly explaining the perpetrator’s motive. In fact, he seems not to have one.

Better times await next week when a mob trial puts heat on Moran, and another case is initiated by a solid citizen trying to block distribution of an old sex tape bound to soil his reputation. Driving the hour is some spirited banter between Harriell and the jockey-sized Madio as about the only characters here that you’d look forward to visiting week after week.

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