Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

The acting in this movie is really good.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Of all the imported US cops and lawyers series shown on British TV in the early 70's, including Kojak, Columbo, Rockford, Cannon, McMillan and Wife, Banacek, Harry O and McCloud (I can't remember anymore!), this is the one I liked best. Barry Newman stars as the eponymous title character, apparently reprising an earlier film role, a smart-suited, sharp-witted Italian-extraction lawyer building his own home out in the country along with his ever-supportive wife (Susan Howard), who becomes the go-to guy for a seemingly never- ending array of almost-beyond-doubt guilty defendants who he then proceeds to unerringly got off in the last reel thanks to his Sherlock Holmes-like deduction skills. In this he was assisted by his loyal, if somewhat slow assistant, Cowboy Pete.The shows took on the whodunit format of Columbo, invariably presenting an open and shut case against the plaintiff only for Petrocelli to turn things around with his own reconstruction of the actual events, usually after he's put himself and / or his wife and / or big Pete in harm's way first to get at the truth. That's the good thing about a whodunit, it keeps you guessing and watching to the very end.Formulaic it may have been, but Newman played the title role with some flair and some flint garnering good support from Howard who was far from the shrinking wife in the background. I remember in particular Newman's habit of saying "No further questions" after he'd roasted a hostile witness on the stand, plus did he ever finish building that house of theirs out in the back of beyond?Anyway, for me this is another of those vintage shows from my youth that I loved at the time and which I'm pleased to say, dodgy fashion aside, holds up well to watching again today.

Barry Newman brought a Jewish profile to a Boston Italian lawyer and pulled it off perfectly. Great pathos on Mr. Newman's part, especially once a week when he would sneer up his lips on one side of his face and say, in a long drawn out drawl,...'yyeaahhh', "Pete" (his P.I., the Underrated Albert Salmi... or "Maggie" if he was talking to his wife)..this kid's innocent...we'll prove it." And his perfect presentation at the end of each episode..."Your Honor, I would like to offer yet ANOTHER version of the events of that night...) It was a great show which, just like "Harry O" in the same time frame, was lost in the mass of more popular Crime Dramas and prematurely cancelled.

I remember one episode where Petrocelli took a parking ticket off of another parked car, then put the ticket on his own car he just parked so he wouldn't get a ticket. I thought it was hilarious because I had been doing the same thing at the college I was going to. I found I could park right next to the building where my engineering class was just by taking the tickets off other cars and putting them under my windshield wiper. It worked every time. I only did this when I was running late and now when I look back (that was in the seventies) I might have caused other people to get two tickets instead of one. But back then the fines for parking tickets were just a dollar. It was cool seeing Petrocelli do the same thing I did. I wonder if he saw me parking one day and then stole my idea.

This series was excellent in all the primary attributes one looks for in a legal drama: the setting was fresh and new, the characters were interesting, the cast was always on the mark, and the writing was both believable and absorbing. I had a major complaint, however, with the most famous aspect of the show. What "Petrocelli" did different from other courtroom dramas was its dramatization of each witness's account of the crime. Unfortunately, this meant it visually presented false accounts--things that *never happened.* I know how rhetoricians, relativists, and post-modernists of every stripe love to debate the non-existence of objective truth, but prime-time television isn't the forum for such questions. It bothered me every time I watched the show, and every time it came up in discussion with others, they (almost to a one) agreed with me.