The ruling on 'Amy' is overturned

Times Union - October 27, 2000

By MARK McGUIRE, Staff writer

As hard as this is to believe, television critics get it wrong once in a while. Not that it's our fault, of course.

In fact, we get it wrong almost every fall, when the new network shows debut. Armed with a tape of the show's first episode -- on rare occasions, we get a second or third installment -- we make our pronouncements: Yea or Nay. Good, Bad or What Were They Thinking?

With all the shows on television, you can't possibly watch every episode of every sitcom and drama in a season. So you endorse or condemn a show on first or second viewing, and move on.

It's not a foolproof system. If it were, "Buddy Faro" would be the biggest hit on television.

You remember "Buddy Faro," don't you? Only two years ago, the CBS drama about an anachronistic Los Angeles private detective premiered with one of the best pilots of the 1998 season.

Here's what I wrote prior to the premiere: "POTENTIAL: Comedic drama in which two movie actors (Dennis Farina and Frank Whaley) just devour the small screen."

"Buddy Faro" was gone and forgotten by that New Year's. The two-hour debut remains a great two-hour television movie. It was the rest of the series that was weak.

Which brings us to another mea culpa: Last fall I judged Amy -- as in Amy Brenneman of "Judging Amy" -- a little too harshly.

The former "NYPD Blue" actor developed the CBS drama based on her mother, one of the first female family court judges in Connecticut. Like mom, Brenneman plays a judge, but in the show her mom is a social worker, portrayed by the great Tyne Daly.

The pilot was merely a warm and fuzzy family drama, and after seeing that first episode I was oh-so-sure that my call was correct: Just another chick show, all gooey and soft like that NBC drama that gets ratings on Fridays. See the pilot, know the show.

Last fall, I called it "CBS' answer to 'Providence': Similar New England towns, similar professions, similar-looking leads," I wrote last fall. "I guess what we're saying is we've seen this before."

Later in the season I tuned in again, just to play catch-up. Like an NFL referee after seeing incontrovertible proof on a replay, I had to reverse my call: "Judging Amy" is a quality drama.

"People did misread it," Brenneman said this summer. "There's a feminist in me who thinks they thought ... it was mother-daughter-family -- thought it was going to be soft. They thought it was going to be emotional, sentimental. The truth was we were writing about very different women."

In fact, the show was a rather deep drama that delved into social ills and had an edge that the mawkish "Providence" lacks. But these qualities were not in evidence in the first episode.

"I knew (the main character) was going to grow into this insanely, almost too-confident judge on the bench," Brenneman continued, "but in the pilot we didn't see that: We saw a different quality, a softer quality -- so I think people thought the show would be soft.

" ... But I kinda loved the fact that it got to grow on people," she said.

I promise to never again mention "Providence" and "Judging Amy" in the same sentence, unless it's to draw a distinction. (I'm not the only one who's given up on the comparison: "That's gone away," Brenneman said.)

But there is another comparison to be made.

Like other critics, I raved about Sela Ward and her ABC drama "Once and Again," which goes head-to-head with "Judging Amy" on Tuesday nights at 10 (WTEN Ch. 10). It remains a fine drama, but critical acclaim hasn't moved Ward's show ahead of Brenneman's in the ratings.

"They were crowned and we were not," Brenneman said. "So (the ratings win) was kind of lovely -- not that I'm competitive or anything."

Oddly enough, I could not get her to say "Die, Sela, die!"

The point of all this is while a television pilot can be a barometer, it might not be the final measurement of a show.

"(With) the pilot, we made a decision to really show my character as a novice," she said this summer. "So she didn't have the energy and savvy that I knew she would get. Once I started kicking butt, people liked that."

On "Judging Amy," critics were the ones that got their butts kicked.

Not that it was our fault, of course.


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