If television often seems hopelessly repetitive, it’s because so many of its denizens boast the same damn jobs. So with all the Law & Orders and Boston Legals, what more could possibly be added to the cannon of litigious television? Try George Michael and Glenn Close.

The former is a hallucinatory guest star on the debut episode of Eli Stone, an Ally McBeal–esque legal dramedy starring Trainspotting’s Johnny Lee Miller. (Yes, I’m sure he’s done other work during the past dozen years, I just don’t care.)

His titular character has visions, but unlike the whimsical dancing babies of Ally’s overactive imagination, Stone’s come courtesy of a brain aneurysm. Or maybe God, which is a nice option because it means the Big Guy communicates via a gay pop star singing “Faith.” There was no George Michael in episode two, but we did get the awesomeness of Canadian co-star Victor Garber (formerly of Alias but originally of famed Toronto musical Godspell) singing “Freedom ’90” backed by a gospel boys’ choir.

All episodes are named after (and feature snippets of) Michael’s back catalogue: “Father Figure,” “Praying For Time” and even a little Wham! love for “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.”
This gimmick is the best part of Eli Stone — Michael’s music holds up surprisingly well — and the upcoming episode where Stone represents the singer for real should be great. But the show often gets bogged down in overly simplistic court cases involving big bad corporations. Admirably, Miller never overplays the schmaltz, but Stone’s Jerry Maguire–esque spiritual awakening-slash-nervous breakdown feels too familiar.

Plus, we’ve already seen the crusading-lawyer-at-an-evil-law-firm character and it can’t hold a candle to Glenn Close’s evil lawyer at a crusading law firm. Close has already won a Golden Globe for her fearsome portrayal of Patty Hewes in Damages, which aired last year on America’s FX network.

Hewes is a cunning, charismatic and diabolically cut-throat “high-stakes” litigator who, like Stone, specializes in corporate malfeasance cases. It’s unclear whether she does this for the downtrodden, or for her cut of the hundreds of millions in settlement money but, regardless, this is a woman for whom the ends always justify the means.

Damages is no feel-good dramedy, but a legal thriller that begins with a bloody, half-naked woman fleeing an apartment. Police assume she’s a traumatized hooker but we quickly flash back to six months earlier to discover she’s Ellen (Rose Byrne), a fresh-from-school lawyer just hired by Patty Hewes.

The rest of this electric first season will whiplash back and forth between the grisly present-day murder scene (for that apartment contains the bludgeoned body of Ellen’s dead fiancé) and Hewes’ class-action lawsuit against billionaire tycoon Arthur Frobisher (in a career-redefining performance by Ted Danson) who “pumped-and-dumped” his company’s stock, bankrupting 5,000 employees.
We should detest him, but Danson, his white hair gleaming like a shark’s fin, somehow finds the family-man vulnerability in a malevolent CEO who snorts cocaine with prostitutes in the back of his Escalade while hiring a hit man. Meanwhile, Hewes is unequivocally on the side of justice and yet the path she takes to get there is horrifying — in last week’s premiere, she had a dog killed to intimidate a witness into testifying.

The result is a legal drama that, against all odds, manages to set a new precedent.

eli stone airs thursday, 10pm on ctv.
DAMAGES AIRS MONDAYS, 10PM ON SHOWCASE

Bite-sized
Over-hyped MySpace series Quarterlife may be migrating to NBC this week, but its Canadian equivalent, the twentysomething satire Twixters, already hit TV screens last fall. Except, um, now it can only be seen online. My head hurts.  

QUARTERLIFE AIRS THURSDAYS, 10PM ON NBC; TWIXTERS STREAMS ON BITETV.CA.