Petrocelli

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Petrocelli was a legal drama which ran on NBC from September 11, 1974 to March 3, 1976. It had 48 episodes.

Tony Petrocelli was an Italian-American Harvard-educated lawyer who gave up the big money and frentic pace of major-metropolitan life to practise in a sleepy city in the American Southwest called San Remo. He and his wife Maggie lived in a trailer in the country while waiting for their new house to be built, and travel around in a beat-up old pickup truck. Tony hired Pete Ritter, a local cowboy, as his investigator.

He worked as a defence lawyer, and each episode followed a similar format, with the client apparently certain to be convicted of a crime of which they were innocent until a late emerging piece of evidence allowed the protagonist to suugest to the jury an alternative possibility. These alternatives were never esdtablished as absolute fact, and there was never any indication of a trial of the person onto whom Petrocelli turned the accusation, but the doubt raised was sufficient to secure the release of his client.

An interesting technique used in the TV series was showing the actual crime in flashbacks from the perspective of various people involve. The flashbacks, naturally, differed depending on whose recollections were being shown.

Newman created the role of Petrocelli in a 1970 movie, The Lawyer, which was loosely based on the Sam Sheppard murder case.