TV Talk: New channel, same courtroom: ‘All Rise’ returns

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

“All Rise” was a welcome outlier on CBS during its two-season, 2019-2021 run on the network. A courtroom procedural among a sea of law enforcement procedurals, “All Rise,” at least in early episodes, got little details about courtrooms right, particularly the staff essentially training a newly appointed judge on the job.

Despite a compelling star in Simone Missick as Judge Lola Carmichael and a diverse supporting cast, “All Rise” was a middling ratings performer with a lot of behind-the-scenes turnover, to the point that its cancellation seemed like it might be as much about that dysfunction as meh ratings.

But OWN has picked up “All Rise” for a 20-episode third season, premiering on the cable network at 8 p.m. Tuesday.

Showrunner/writer Dee Harris Lawrence, who was co-showrunner during much of the show’s CBS run and stepped into the lead behind-the-scenes role near the end of season two, brings the same mix of light character humor and more serious courtroom drama to early episodes of season three.

There’s a greater emphasis on character and relationship in the season premiere in part because of a need to partially write out a too- expensive-for-cable-budgets co-star (Marg Helgenberger gets “special guest star” billing on episode one; she’s not in episode two but will be in four of the 10 episodes airing this summer). The show picks up about six months after season two with the conclusion of Lola’s judicial campaign against Corrine Cuthbert (guest star Anne Heche).

Fans of the CBS version of “All Rise” won’t see an appreciable difference in the OWN iteration of the series.

“CBS did not curtail us in any way and the type of stories we wanted to do,” Harris Lawrence said during a February press conference that was part of the Television Critics Association virtual winter 2022 press tour. “And OWN has given us that same platform and for us to expand on it more. Our theme this season is new beginnings, and we’re going to be going with that full force.”

Missick, who now has an executive producer title on the series, said “All Rise” will lean into continuing character stories more heavily than in the past.

“We get to find out a little bit more of who they are underneath, which is very exciting because that kind of diversity on screen was initially nurtured and now it’s only being flourished even more as we step out this third season,” she said (Lola’s husband, Robin Taylor, will be played by a different actor with Christian Keyes replacing Todd Williams).

Behind-the-scenes at the courthouse, several characters will shift into new roles in season three, but the platonic friendship between Lola and deputy district attorney Mark Callan (Wilson Bethel) remains intact.

“There’s more of a deepening sense of how these friends take care of each other in ways that are not sexualized or ‘will they or won’t they’ or anything like that,” Bethel said. “Because we are not having to engage in the tropes of ‘will they or won’t they’ and the relationship dynamics that often drive these male-female relationships on TV, it means that we have a whole lot of time to explore different ways that relationships develop that are, quite frankly, more unique and interesting.”