Ellen Gray: 'One Angry Juror' based on real-life case

SO MUCH television, so little time:

* Lawyers may not like lawyer jokes, but TV drama's been very, very good to the legal profession, with at least 10 heroic prosecutors or legal eagles fighting for the little guy for every $500-an-hour mouthpiece shown defending corporate shenanigans.

Certainly the product placement doesn't get much better than "One Angry Juror" (9 tonight, Lifetime), in which Jessica Capshaw plays a New Orleans corporate lawyer whose reasonable doubts about a defendant's guilt first lead to a hung jury and then to her decision to help in his defense in the retrial.

Far-fetched as it sounds, it's based on an actual case in New Orleans (the lawyer's name has been changed, along with at least one too-good-to-be-true detail at the end of the movie), and as Lifetime movies go, it's more than watchable.

Still, I couldn't help thinking, as I watched Capshaw's character try to argue her way out of a jury duty, of the Philadelphia lawyer I saw try to do the same thing years ago by insisting that he didn't believe in that most basic of legal concepts, the presumption of innocence.

No TV movies for him, I'm thinking.

* As "The Big C" ends its first season (10:30 tonight, Showtime), it seems safe to say Laura Linney's Cathy Jamison won't be dying right now, Showtime having announced a second-season pickup way back in September.

But the suicide of one of the show's major characters in last week's installment did rock me back on my heels, even if it also seemed too easy a way to wrap up what would otherwise might have become a downer of a story line.

And for a show about a woman with Stage 4 melanoma, "The Big C" goes to almost absurd lengths to avoid being too much of a downer.

Though I've wondered sometimes, as I watched Linney's character embark on a torrid affair with a conveniently situated artist - played by the conveniently gorgeous Idris Elba - or dance with an alternative medicine man - played by Liam Neeson - or get hit on, charmingly, by the puppy-eyed younger man (Reid Scott) who just happens to be her available-at-all-hours oncologist, how real women with cancer might react.

Yes, Cathy's cancer is still a monster. But like Showtime's "Dexter" and the Henry VIII we saw in "The Tudors," it may be too pretty a monster to be fully believed.

* As the first week of "Conan" wore on, his bitterness seemed to lessen and his comfort level increase, I noticed.

But his continued fixation on mentioning his move to "basic cable" does little more than highlight the fact that the 47-year-old late-show host's a baby boomer, older than many of the viewers he attracts and apparently too old to realize that for them, cable's as basic as breathing.

They were raised not just by "The Simpsons," but by Nickelodeon and MTV, and most of them have never thought of rabbit ears as being separate from rabbits, much less considered discriminating against channels because they couldn't be snatched mysteriously from the air and played on a large piece of living-room furniture.

They've come to TBS to see Conan O'Brien, not a "Tonight Show"-style desk and a studio.

So maybe it's time for Conan to stop acting like an exiled aristocrat and just give thanks he's no longer on a network whose owners don't even value it as much as they do its "basic cable" siblings.

* Speaking of basic cable, "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart was on MSNBC's "Rachel Maddow Show" last week, talking about cable news ("The problem with a 24-hour news cycle is that it is built for a very particular thing . . . 9/11. Other than that there isn't really 24 hours of stuff to talk about in the same way").

Apparently people at CNN were watching.

The next morning, a PR person for "Anderson Cooper 360" sent out an e-mail with the subject line: "Jon Stewart Bashes MSNBC but Praises CNN's Anderson Cooper While a Guest on Rachel Maddow's Show!"

Here, according to an attached excerpt, is a bit of what Stewart said about Cooper:

"Anderson Cooper, I think he does a really nice job. He's fun to watch. And you [Maddow] as well. And I like on a usual basis a lot of this stuff . . . But he's got a bit on his show that I love called 'Keeping them Honest,' which is so funny to me because . . . it would be like me introducing - I've got a new segment called, 'Telling Jokes to An Audience,' it's just whenever you hear that, you're like, isn't that what this whole thing is?"

In the CNN e-mail, this translated to: "some nice praise for 'Anderson Cooper 360's' 'Keeping them Honest.' "

Poor Stewart. Sarcasm gets him nowhere with some people. *

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