Joe's View

Several years before it became popular to film TV series such as “Law & Order” and “Sex and the City” in New York City, CBS gave a greenlight to “Leg Work,” a wonderful show that featured Margaret Colin and Frances McDormand as a private detective and her pal who works in the district attorney’s office.

I was only able to see three or four episodes in the fall of 1987 before CBS yanked the show off the air — four of the original ten shows were never aired by the network — but I was left with fond memories of an extremely well-written and well-acted series.

Because it was produced in Manhattan, the show was able to draw on the city’s theater acting pool. Up-and-comers Lisa Banes, Marisa Tomei, John Pankow and Angela Bassett were just a few of the actors I had already seen in plays and was pleased — and surprised — to see on TV.

After CBS axed the show, “Leg Work” popped up a few times as filler programming on the Lifetime cable network — by that time, Colin and McDormand had become better known due to their film work — but I figured I would never have a chance to see the episodes I missed. Nothing is dead-er than a flop TV series without enough episodes to syndicate.

This is where the miracle of the Internet comes in. Idly web surfing a few weeks ago, I Googled “Leg Work” and was stunned to see that an eBay merchant called goldmonkey.com (!) was offering all ten episodes on DVD for a little more than $10.

A few days later, a tiny package arrived in the mail with all ten episodes on two DVDs. While the visual quality is far from perfect — it looks like a copy of a copy — the show turned out to be every bit as good as I remembered.

Colin is terrific as Claire McCarron and McDormand perfect as her world-weary pal Willie Pipal.

The writing is as sophisticated as anything on HBO or Showtime right now and one of the episodes CBS didn’t air — “Life Itself” — deals with the AIDS crisis in a way that Hollywood wouldn’t even contemplate until “Philadelphia” came out six years later.

The Manhattan backdrops give the show the same sort of realistic texture that “Law & Order” would display a few years later, and “Sex and the City” would have a full decade later (some of Colin and McDormand’s brunch and bar stool conversations about their arid sex lives are on the same page as the similar chit chat of the four Manhattan friends in “SATC”).

What a shame that this fine show was never given a real chance to connect with the TV public. It was just five or ten years ahead of its time.

How nice that the miracle of the World Wide Web makes it possible for us to see this lost show again.