This does not make the upcoming "The Firm" on NBC sound very good:
Is there an audience so attached to "The Firm" brand name - 18 years after the movie, and 20 since the book was published - that they'll tune into any generic legal drama working under that title? Probably some, but not enough to make the new version a hit on its own. (The dismal performance of TNT's "Innocent" last month can't have given NBC a lot of confidence, even though the circumstances aren't exactly the same and Lucas was considered a movie star much more recently than Bill Pullman.) Brand names can sometimes help with awareness - or, in the case of "Prime Suspect," they can hurt your show among anyone who remembers the original - but ultimately you need a show that will stand up on its own merits and not on people's hazy memory of a story they enjoyed back when Amy Fisher was still a big deal.
Oh well, I might still give it a shot, but with a lot of potentially good midseason replacements coming up ("Alcatraz" and "Touch" on Fox; "Missing" and "The River" on ABC), it may not survive the inevitable culling.
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