TELEVISION REVIEWS

Sure she's offensive, she's the defense

BY GLENN GARVIN

ggarvin@MiamiHerald.com

• Canterbury's Law, 8-9 p.m. Monday, WSVN-Fox 7

• High School Confidential, 9-10 p.m. Monday, WE

Elizabeth Canterbury, the pitiless and implacable defense attorney at the center of Fox's new legal drama Canterbury's Law, is no Perry Mason. She wiretaps witnesses, coaches her clients to perjure themselves and taunts the parents of murder victims. It actually brightens her day when she's charged with jury-tampering. ''Even Clarence Darrow was accused of tampering with a jury,'' she boasts. ``It's like I've arrived.''

If she sounds more like the villain than the hero, you're beginning to navigate the warped geography of Canterbury's Law, which exists in a world where the conventional rules of drama have been repealed. No television series has been built around a less likable character, or rendered itself so strangely, compulsively watchable as a result.

It's tempting to compare Elizabeth Canterbury -- played with a parched intensity by Julia Margulies in her first TV role since leaving ER eight years ago -- with another recent television antihero, Tony Soprano. Certainly they share the same mix of reptilian survival instincts and obtuse manners.

But Tony Soprano cultivated a bearish charm, so much so that characters and viewers alike had to be reminded with periodic vicious murders that this was not a nice man. One of the fascinations of Canterbury's Law, by contrast, is looking for any clue of its protagonist's humanity.

Canterbury abuses her own staff, joylessly cheats on her husband and is so cynical she even appalls herself. ''I've become a damn vaudeville act,'' she broods to a colleague as she prepares for a courtroom appearance. ``I need ignorant juries. I need them worried. And I need them to trust me. And that comes down to whether this shirt brings out my eyes.''

Burned out not only on the law but her imploded marriage, locked in a barbarously personal war with the local prosecutor, Canterbury has been stripped of nearly every emotion but rage, which she marshals with an awesome capacity on behalf of her clients. When she snaps to a reproving partner, after reducing the mother of a murder victim to tears on the witness stand, ''I did what I had to do,'' it's less an explanation than an epitaph for her life.

`HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL'

If Canterbury's Law is a cautionary tale about middle-aged meltdowns, High School Confidential is a reminder that burnout can start much, much earlier. This unsettling documentary series on the cable WE network, which follows a dozen Kansas City girls through four years in their suburban high school, suggests we've come a long, hard way from Grease.

The dilemma the girls face in High School Confidential -- how young, unformed personalties can establish independent identities in an environment dominated by peer pressure -- is as old as school itself. But as filmmaker Sharon Liese discovers, the stakes are higher, and go on the table much earlier than ever before. Two of her girls are pregnant by their sophomore years, while others fall under the dysfunctional spell of self-mutilation or eating disorders.

And even that toll seems luckily low as you listen to the confused girls try to chart their way across a landscape from which all moral landmarks seem to have been erased. It may seem a heretical question to Baby Boomers whose highest parenting value is friendship with their kids, but is it really a positive development that 14-year-old girls now feel comfortable having conversations in front of their parents -- not to mention a couple of million television viewers -- about oral sex?

And what about the content of those conversations? ''If they have a boyfriend and they've been going out for a while,'' declares one girl forthrightly, ''I don't really see anything wrong with it.'' And what, wonders the interviewer, is a while. ''At least, like, a month,'' the girl replies, as her father cannot suppress a visible shudder. Even without reading it here, you know much worse is in store for him.