‘Justice’ watchers who protect the innocent

While it is in execution no better (nor worse) than average, the new ABC legal detective series “In Justice” -- premiering Sunday before taking up its regular Friday night post later in the week -- earns points in a few respects. (One demerit off the top, however, for the poorly punning title.)

First, it is a crime drama that does not give over its opening episode to a serial killer or strew naked female corpses in weedy fields. In fact, it begins with a good old-fashioned domestic tragedy. Second, it does not send the camera hurtling down entrance wounds for a quick thrill. And third, it focuses not on the usual business, currently occupying vast tracts of prime-time network real estate, of punishing the guilty, but rather on freeing the innocent. (Of course, for every innocent person sprung, one true perp goes down -- but the point remains.) It’s kind of “Cold Case” in reverse, or sideways.

For bucking these trends alone, I wish it the luck it will need. And at a time when civil liberties are taken less than seriously in high places, it’s useful to have a popular entertainment whose premise is that what we like to call the justice system does not always dispense it -- and not from malice so much as from ordinary hubris and sloth.

“The biggest cop mistake,” says wealthy Bay Area playboy corporate lawyer David Swain (Kyle MacLachlan, of “Twin Peaks”), is “making an early assumption and sticking with it.” Swain who has grown bored with his usual work of saving rich people money, is funding the National Justice Project, a fictional version of the dozens of “innocence projects” that have been established around the country (most connected with law or journalism schools) over the last decade or so. (Among the best known are at Northwestern University in Illinois and at New York’s Cardozo School of Law, co-founded by Barry Scheck, of O.J. Simpson trial fame.)

The series is set in Oakland, presumably because it’s a city with a nice high crime rate, and because San Quentin, where they store prisoners of both the wrongly and rightly convicted varieties, is just across the water, and because the office rents are lower there. Running the operation is ex-cop Charles Conti (Jason O’Mara), who left the force under traumatic circumstances and is, we infer, engaged in this work as a kind of penance or payback. He can tell you a thing or two about the ways that police influence witnesses and cook evidence, and -- assuming it isn’t all made up -- these passages have some of the same interest as card trick expert Ricky Jay discussing magic. (The elements are the same, and the effects equally astounding.)

Swain seems intended to be the show’s Denny Crane (the character played by William Shatner on “Boston Legal”), the amusing, amoral eccentric. “I can never tell if you’re a cynical man pretending to be sentimental or the other way around,” Conti tells him. (“Does it matter?” Swain replies.)

It is suggested he has political ambitions, without actually having any politics. He has a big, folk-arty painting on his wall, quotes Kurt Vonnegut -- perhaps he was a hippie once -- and dispenses espresso and Gummi Bears to his staff, who are not the college students who usually staff these things but young lawyers, variously out to help the world or help themselves. They are the usual band of beauties, but of course not without their faults and issues. Some may emerge as characters in the fullness of time; for now they’re yoked to such classic routines as the Mismatched Partners, familiar from a hundred earlier cop shows and movies.

The show’s shifts in tone can seem ungainly; the comedy, of which there is more than usual in such shows, sometimes rubs uncomfortably against the premise. (This is made explicit, as if the writers understood this is a problem, when a client, trying to free her husband from prison, chides MacLachlan for inappropriate mirth.) Yet the show is best when it’s funniest; if there is yet something artificial about the banter that MacLachan and O’Mara exchange, there is something actual in their chemistry. (MacLachlan and O’Mara, it even sounds like a vaudeville team.) When the series gets serious, it tends toward the sentimental. It tugs at your heart with the annoying insistence of a child tugging at your sleeve. My response then, in either case, is the same: “Please stop.”

*

‘In Justice’

Where: ABC

When: 10 to 11 p.m. Sunday; regular time slot 9 to 10 p.m. Fridays

Kyle MacLachlan...David Swain

Jason O’Mara...Charles Conti

Marisol Nichols...Sonya Quintano

Constance Zimmer...Brianna

Daniel Cosgrove...Jon Lemonick

Executive producers Stu Bloomberg, Robert King, Michelle King and Jeff Melvion.