Critic Reviews

The series works to play to the audience’s natural affection for him [Jimmy Smits] to counteract McGee’s dissonant terseness. But the rest of the ensemble helps to ameliorate the brew, particularly the excellent Jayne Atkinson, Barry Sloane and MaameYaa Boafo. Like many new series, this is a drama that isn’t entirely cooked, but it could be a decent stew by midseason.

It’s a noble drama, but it’s not all that original. Smits’ accent is a eye-opener.

Formula procedural but at least a comfortable, easy-to-watch one, with a comfortable, easy-to-watch lead.

Smits is solid enough as the patriarch of Bluff City Law while McGee also makes her presence felt in some scenes. Overall, though, this is yet another same old, same old broadcast network drama series.

This is all less enthralling than it sounds.

In its first two episodes, what works tepidly well here is a family dynamic that at least feels unusual; what does not are heard-them-all-before clichés about the power and responsibilities of attorneys.

Structurally, the show whips around from weekly forgettable David vs. Goliath cases to one serialized case without enough meat on its bones to justify the extension and more frivolous legal matters like the fight over a BBQ recipe. ... Generally the show feels like something David E. Kelley would have made and made better 20 years ago.

A legal procedural strained through the cornball naturalism of NBC’s pride and joy “This Is Us,” the series has the deep-pile Quality Drama feel the network favors, with a muted palette and a pillowy soundtrack (spelled by an occasional blues or soul classic), with room built in for significant looks and pregnant pauses. ... Righteousness predominates, with scripts arranged so that all the pieces fall into order, that the wrong shall fail and the right prevail.

“Bluff City Law” is to legal dramas as last season’s “New Amsterdam” is to medical dramas: emotionally manipulative and meh.