Did you people see the same film I saw?

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Blistering performances.

Petrocelli is a fine US legal drama, and it's a shame it ran for only two seasons. If Saved by the Bell can run for 20 seasons, then there's no justice really in the TV world.Barry Newman and his on screen wife Susan Howard displayed great chemistry and I always liked the ending when Petrocelli would give his wife an update on the progress of their house construction. Maybe one day Petrocelli can be rebooted, because it's an impressive series that deserves another run. It's sort of the antidote to Suits and other flashy legal drama shows that form part of the legal entertainment landscape nowadays.

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.

I think the best lessons "Petrocelli" teaches us are that 1) things aren't always as they seem, and 2) there's a good reason to presume a person innocent until proven guilty - because he just might be innocent, after all. This is a cast that worked very well together, and the writing, too, was excellent. I liked the fact that we would see the crime being committed from different perspectives. I don't know if "Petrocelli" was the first show to ever do that, but it sure kept me tuned in every week. It would be wonderful if TV Land would run this series again.

Spun-off from the movie "The Lawyer" (qv), "Petrocelli" is a great, one hour courtroom drama starring Barry Newman as the displaced New York Lawyer in the desert, Tony Petrocelli. In the late 1990s there was something of a revival in its popularity in the UK, when the BBC began screening it daily in their early afternoon (2pm) slot. It was certainly more entertaining than the show it replaced, "Quincy MD", although perhaps it did not scale the heights reached by the champion of that particular timeslot, "Columbo". "Petrocelli" became the all time favourite tv show of my University friend and housemate Neil, who would often miss lectures to catch the daily afternoon dose of legal drama. I wouldn't go that far, but I'd still say it's great entertainment. When compared to some of the lame legal dramas out there today ("The Practice", anyone?) the writing here is positively superb.