Cliff Lipson, CBS James Garner and Joe Mantegna, foreground, are intended to provide the lofty, issue-driven drama of First Monday, while their twentysomething clerks -- left to right, Joe Flanigan, Hedy Burress, Randy Vasquez and Christopher Wiehl -- are there to, well, just get it on.

Law is a dreary business. The stock-in-trade of most lawyers -- sorting out bankruptcies, litigating commercial disputes, dealing with government regulators -- is often tedious and morally sterile. A TV show set in a real law firm, or a real court, would be more boring than community access.

Hollywood has two strategies for making the law interesting. The first approach, typified by Law & Order and Homicide: Life on the Street, is to focus on a narrow branch of law: criminal cases involving rape and murder. These shows work because the moral stakes are high enough to impart drama to the obscure motions, procedural shenanigans and evidentiary squabbles that are the stuff of law.

The other strategy is epitomized by Ally McBeal. While real-life law firms are full of pasty workaholics, Ally portrays an alternate universe full of leggy bombshells who cannot walk to the photocopier without attracting a lesbianic proposition or stumbling on some other titillating intrigue.

The new CBS drama First Monday, which aspires to do to the United States Supreme Court what The West Wing does to the White House, taps both strategies. On one level, the show is a lofty drama in which issues of constitutional import are hashed out by the Court's nine justices. On another, it is a toned-down Ally, with the justices' twentysomething clerks supplying the sexual tension. Unfortunately, each strategy has been bungled.

In Tuesday's debut episode, the highbrow plot revolves around the scheduled execution of a defendant convicted of killing a child during a botched robbery. In the opening scene, a lightning bolt singes the death-row prisoner as he lies shivering in a rain-soaked prison pen. The issue the justices wrestle with for the next hour is whether putting him in the electric chair -- having him face electrocution twice, in effect -- might be "cruel and unusual."

Like the real Supreme Court, the First Monday court, whose chief justice is played by James Garner, is split into two entrenched factions -- one liberal, the other conservative. (Joe Mantegna is cast as the wavering rookie.) But while the bench is balanced, the show is not. The right-leaning justices and clerks are portrayed as dogmatists who alienate their female colleagues with football-themed jingoism. Their opposite number, on the other hand, are thoughtful, humane and articulate.

Just as bad is the black-and-white presentation of the underlying crime. When the law-and-order genre is done right, the circumstances surrounding, say, a he-said/she-said date-rape case are steeped in the Rashomon-like stew of genuine ambiguity that characterizes real criminal trials. But in Tuesday's First Monday episode, such ambiguity was absent: The death-row convict is shown to be plainly innocent of capital murder and the clerk who crusades on his behalf a failed heroine.

As for First Monday's portrayal of actual courtroom action, it is so unrealistic that Carter Phillips, a leading Washington, D.C., attorney who has argued dozens of cases before the Supreme Court, has described it as "vomitous." Of course, Hollywood generally misrepresents courtroom procedures for dramatic effect. But First Monday is over-the-top. In one scene from Tuesday's episode, a justice grows bored with the vampy lawyer representing a transsexual seeking asylum in the United States. In complete violation of court protocol, he begins badgering the appellant him/herself, asking whether s/he plans to be "castrated like a bull."

As for the sexpot attorney, she does double duty as the centrepiece of the lowbrow plot line. Following the above-described scene, one of the rookie justice's three clerks -- the right-wing hawk of the trio, naturally -- hits on her as she dines in a nearby restaurant. What follows is the obligatory USA Network-style sleazy salsa-dancing scene. The twist comes when it's time for the clerk to take the woman home. Straining to make her suddenly deepened voice heard over the pounding Latin music, she tells him, "I defend transsexuals ... because I am one!"

Vomitous? Not quite. But Ally McBeal comes off rather well by comparison.