Putting L.A. law in a time machine

Welcome to 2030, the setting of “Century City,” which premieres tonight on CBS and may be described as “L.A. Law” meets “The Jetsons” -- and which is a little less fun than that sounds.

So what does the future hold for greater L.A.? The air is clear. There’s a monorail. (A monorail!) The Grove is still standing, apparently, as are those awful condos across the street. Whole Foods is also mentioned, and it’s probably even harder to park there than it is now.

People will still say “24/7,” much as people today still use the phrase “23 skidoo.” Most people will dress pretty much the way we do now -- I was really hoping for togas -- and your 2004 hairdo will serve you well 26 years hence from now, if you still have hair. New disease: hepatitis D. Abortion: still legal. Mick Jagger: going strong. (No mention of Keith.)

And law firms in TV dramas will still feature an “A story” and a “B story,” one serious and one less so, and will still employ at least one vain skirt-chaser (Eric Schaeffer here) and a wise old bird who has seen it all (Hector Elizondo, whose character can remember the 1970s, when cherries had pits), and juries will still be swayed into deciding cases based on sentiment instead of facts, and on laws they wish existed rather than ones that do.

The firm of Crane, Constable, McNeil and Montero -- which has some swank automated offices in the titular Century City -- seems to have a knack for representing people actually in the wrong, though I suspect my reading of wrong and that of the writers’ don’t necessarily align. But someone has to take the unpopular side, and they do keep coming out on top.

The ultimate culprit in all these cases is, of course, science, which will continue to make mischief by making new bad things possible. Reproductive breakthroughs are at the heart of both the “A” stories in the first two episodes of “Century City,” and that is, indeed, the next big ethical minefield. One involves cloning and growing a baby to steal half its liver. The other concerns preemptive eugenics -- pre-selecting embryos on the basis of projected personality traits -- and a doctor who has been keeping secret the probable homosexuality of the embryos in various petri dishes in order to stem the shrinking of the gay population -- shrinking because of all those millions of unselected gay embryos. (Once again, TV mistakes upper-class obsessions -- all these procedures and gimmicks are not for the poor -- for widespread cultural phenomena.)

Created by Paul Attanasio (“Homicide: Life on the Streets”) and Katie Jacobs (“Gideon’s Crossing”), the show has obviously had some thought put into it, especially as regards the gadgets and gizmos of the almost-near future. It’s the bigger ideas that can seem a little fuzzy. The lapses are sometimes small, but they’re nagging; they shake the foundations of everything built upon them.

A crucial moment in the gay eugenics story, for instance, is based on the feeble premise that gay (male) teenagers don’t like sports. And in her closing argument, tough-but-warm-cookie Hanna Crane (Viola Davis) recites a list of great homosexuals who might never have been born had the sex-preference predictive technology been available -- improbably citing Samuel Barber, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and

Fortunately, when the gavel is locked in the gavel drawer, there is still sex. The show’s main charge comes from the sparks that fly between the lovely young associates: idealistic Lukas Gold (Ioan Gruffudd) and “beautiful, genetically re-engineered first-year attorney Lee May Bristol” (Kristin Lehman), to borrow a description from the press release. He’s married, which will be a problem if the show sticks around -- we’ll see the limits of his idealism then -- but this is the good old-fashioned kind of problem that science can’t cause or cure.

Mention should also be made of Nestor Carbonell as a charming ex-congressman with no real legal experience but good instincts. He’s good, as is the rest of the cast.

Perhaps because stories of the future are always really stories about the present -- presenting the logical ends (utopian, dystopian) of our current obsessions and technologies -- they work better as satire. (As a predictor of the future I’ll take “Futurama” over “Minority Report.”) The grander “Century City” gets, the flatter it falls; the more it concentrates on the banal, the better it is. All we really want to know, after all, is when do the jet packs get here?

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‘Century City’

Where: CBS

When: Premieres 9 to 10 tonight.

Rating: The network has rated the show TVPG.

Hector Elizondo...Marty Constable

Nestor Carbonell...Tom Montero

Viola Davis...Hannah Crane

Ioan Gruffudd...Lukas Gold

Kristin Lehman...Lee May Bristol

Eric Schaeffer...Darwin McNeil

Creators Paul Attanasio and Katie Jacobs. Executive producers Attanasio, Jacobs, Ed Zuckerman. Director (tonight’s premiere) Michael Lehmann. Writer (tonight’s premiere) Zuckerman.