Complicated legal affairs

Attorney-novelist Scott Turow’s poky legal potboiler “Reversible Errors” has become “Scott Turow’s Reversible Errors” (CBS, Sunday and Tuesday at 9 p.m.), a workmanlike two-part TV movie as easy to watch as it is to forget. Though it occasionally stumbles against infelicitous dialogue; icky sexual euphemisms (and ickier sex scenes); a lack of chemistry between two characters who are supposed to have nothing but; a too-stylish film-noir score that undercuts the film’s tenuous realism; and the unnatural blackness of Tom Selleck’s hair, eyebrows and mustache -- he looks to have been styled by a mortician -- it does get to where it’s going.

Its most attractive points are some fine performances, particularly those of Felicity Huffman and William H. Macy (married in the real world) as a disgraced judge and the defense lawyer who loves her.

Macy is an idiosyncratic actor whose art-house cred brings a sheen of integrity to any project he chooses. He’s created for himself an acting style that might be called “deadpan intensity,” and has a way of making the flattest dialogue sound not exactly natural, but convincing in a kind of stylized way. Huffman is more naturalistic; she gets down inside her role and just behaves.

The story of a triple-murder case reopened after seven years, on the verge of the execution of the possibly wrongfully convicted killer, “Reversible Errors” is not exactly a thriller -- not in the usual sense anyway (the usual sense of something being thrilling).

There is little in the way of suspense or action or even of detective work or courtroom drama. New confessions revise and complete old versions of “the truth,” but these are offered whole to the various investigators and attorneys, not pieced together clue by clue. No one is ever in real danger. There is the question of whether a man will be executed, but the answer to that is patently obvious almost from the beginning.

What tension there is here derives from the parallel love stories -- it was good enough for Shakespeare -- involving Arthur Raven and Gillian Sullivan (Macy and Huffman) on the one hand, and police detective Larry Starczek (Selleck) and prosecutor Muriel Wynn (Monica Potter) on the other. (The former “Magnum, P.I.” is holding up well, but someone should find him a woman his own age.)

Roughly speaking, Macy and Huffman are the altruistic good guys -- determined as they are to clear the innocent, and because their love is halting and true -- and Selleck and Potter the self-serving bad, determined as they are to maintain their former conviction, and because their amour is sweaty and illicit. But all are more or less caught up in events.

Though, dramatically, one relationship should balance the other, they play as somewhat lopsided, largely due to the miscasting of Potter, who doesn’t have quite the heft or hardness for the part of an ambitious public prosecutor. And she strikes few sparks with Selleck, always an amiable presence on the small screen -- though I think that mustache may have killed his movie career -- and perhaps a little too amiable here.

Director Mike Robe, who also helmed the 1992 TV movie of Turow’s “Burden of Proof,” keeps everything clear and moving, like a traffic cop, but the movie seems to skim the surface of the material rather than digging down into it. Screenwriter Alan Sharp -- back in the old New Hollywood days, the author of Arthur Penn’s “Night Moves” and Peter Fonda’s “The Hired Hand” -- substantially follows the novel, though he has rejiggered a few motivations, made characters marginally more sympathetic, or more quickly digestible, created scenes for convenience or symmetry and rewritten some dialogue, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.

And Turow -- notwithstanding a hardy, widespread reputation as a superior composer of popular fiction -- is not above improvement. Though cleverly plotted and not shy of Big Issues, his writing can be fairly trite, especially when he attempts to portray ordinary human concourse. (His sex scenes are laughable.)

He does better with interrogation and deposition, and this is where the movie also comes alive. James Rebhorn as an airport security chief, Shemar Moore as his troubled nephew and Glenn Plummer as the condemned man especially benefit from these essentially monologic passages, and do well by them.

*

‘Scott Turow’s Reversible Errors’

Where: CBS

When: 9-11 p.m. Sunday, concludes 9-11 p.m. Tuesday

Rating: The network has rated the miniseries TV-14DLSV (may not be suitable for children younger than 14, with advisories for suggestive dialogue, coarse language, sex and violence).

William H. Macy...Arthur Raven

Tom Selleck...Larry Starczek

Monica Potter...Muriel Wynn

Felicity Huffman...Gillian Sullivan

Shemar Moore...Collins Farwell

Glenn Plummer...Romeo “Squirrel” Gandolph

James Rebhorn...Erno Erdai

Executive producers, Frank von Zerneck and Robert M. Sertner. Director, Mike Robe. Writer, Alan Sharp, based on the novel by Scott Turow.