I have to admit that I'm a big fan of Jimmy Smits so I was rooting for NBC's new show "Outlaw" to be good but the pilot is pretty rough. The premise is that Smits's character is a conservative Supreme Court Justice who has his world rocked when his father, a liberal lion who helped fight for civil rights in the 60's, is killed in a car accident. He becomes a staunch liberal, fighting for the rights of the underprivileged, and decides to quit the bench and become a defense lawyer.

If you have trouble with that, well, things only get worse from there. The main case (featuring Rza as a wrongly convicted man on death row) is thin and the way that the team (made up of fairly one dimensional characters including Carly Pope's loose and liberal PI) solves them are silly. For this show to succeed, they either need to make this Law & Order with interesting cases or LA Law with interesting characters. Right now, the only thing it has going for it is Smits and even his character has too weird of a backstory to really relate.

In the end, this show feels like NBC realized that they had a no minority stars on the network last season and decided to throw something, anything at Smits. It certainly doesn't feel like a fully fleshed out network show and I doubt it would have ever made it past the first script read at sister station USA (which has consistently put out better shows than NBC.) I hope it gets better but I'm pretty sure that after next week, this one will be off the season pass.

And if you don't believe me, watch it yourself.