USA’s ‘Fairly Legal’ is fairly entertaining

So she was naturally thrown for a loop when her father, Teddy, a partner at the law firm she worked at, died.

Even when he was alive, they had their own approach to practicing law, and long nights debating him left her capable of carrying on entire conversations with his memory over a bottle of wine and his mortal cremains, in the cabin of the boat he left to her.

This is the complicated life we meet in the premiere of the legal dramedy “Fairly Legal,” following the second season return of “Royal Pains,” Thursday nights on USA.

Kate’s life is filled with conflict, not just because she hasn’t practiced law since his funeral. Instead, she works in arbitration. That is, she’s thrown into situations where the parties are still contentious but want to avoid a court appearance for one reason or another.

It’s thankless work and she’s regularly in peril of contempt -- some judges don’t like mediators, which is her title at the law firm of Reed & Reed.

Law firm

That’s the other problem -- the other Reed, her boss, is her stepmother. Just to give you some idea, she assigns “Wizard of Oz” ringtones to her friends, family and colleagues and her stepmother, the ice queen Lauren Reed, gets The Wicked Witch of the West.

Lauren puts Kate, a former lawyer, in uncomfortable positions in Lauren’s efforts to rebuild the firm following Teddy’s death. Fortunately Kate gets help from her paralegal, Leo, designated by The Cowardly Lion.

Leo is a resource to her because he uses his connections from his cyberlife in World of Warcraft and vast love of graphic novels and genre fiction to get her what she needs, sometimes before she realizes she needs it.

At the same time she’s dealing with all of the family drama in the wake of Teddy Reed’s death, she’s trying to nail down exactly what happened when a gunman caused a CEO to crash his car -- the CEO’s father wants to exact punishment, but they want to avoid the courts for reasons Kate spends the pilot episode figuring out.

Also, she is saddled with a couple’s abortive engagement where they want to sue everyone in sight for millions because it wasn’t perfect -- and especially because the woman lost the man’s grandmother’s ring. The judge demanded she make this case go away or he’d cite her for contempt -- “And I can do it, too,” he warned.

All this on the day she talks down a gunman holding up a coffee shop. She’s ordering a coffee when he pops in and demands all the money in the till. She negotiates what he actually wants -- some beer and some beef jerky -- and the barista still makes her pay for her $4.50 coffee and muffin -- “It’s organic,” he said.

What. Ever.

Excitement

So that wasn’t a situation she’s likely to encounter everyday -- if she does, she should see a priest about removing a curse or something. But Kate is a character who is more than a little bit disorganized and it makes for exciting television because she’s constantly running here and running there to mediate arguments. As she pointed out in a conversation she was having with her late father, he sees the law as sacrosanct, whereas she sees it as a negotiation between people, and if you can get people to talk to each other and find out what they really want, you can get them to come to some kind of agreement.

On the face of it, that is a bit too idealistic. But Kate is played by the gorgeous Sarah Shahi, so between smart and beautiful, her character brings a certain amount of leverage to her negotiations and whatever she does, I look forward to watching her try.

“Fairly Legal” airs at 10/9c Thursdays on USA.