This Saturday, FX is running the entire first season (up to now) of its legal thriller Damages as an all-day marathon, which means theoretically there will be viewers who will get to experience this show the way it might work best: as a rock ’em, sock ’em miniseries, compounding all of the story’s elaborate and sometimes preposterous shocks and twists into a roller-coaster ride that doesn’t require waiting a week between chapters.The ratings have been, even by cable standards, a disappointment, and as I write this, FX had yet to confirm a second-season renewal (although as I’ve said before, any network that would keep Dirt and The Riches going and fail to renew this gritty gem has some explaining to do). I’ve wondered if the show’s elaborately serialized structure, with an entire season built around a single case and its murderous fallout, may have kept viewers away (shades of ABC’s short-lived Murder One).The brutality and darkness of Damages...
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The death penalty has long been a part of best-selling novelist-lawyer Scott Turow's life. The Presumed Innocent author opposed it as a student in the '60s. As a federal prosecutor in the '80s, he decided it was a necessary evil. After working on a death-penalty appeal in the '90s, he realized the system made mistakes. In 2000, he served on an Illinois commission studying death-row reforms. Tonight at 9 pm/ET, CBS airs the second half of his miniseries, Reversible Errors. Based on Turow's 2002 novel about a capital-punishment case, it co-stars William H. Macy, Tom Selleck and Shemar Moore. The film follows a corporate lawyer's last-ditch appeal of a man's murder conviction, while the cop who put the inmate on death row struggles to keep him there.
TV Guide Online: What inspired you to write about the death penalty?Scott Turow: There's a case that was the rough progenitor of Reversible Errors. I represented a guy who was
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