Frances Grant: Doomed to be quirky

In the latest American procedural crime drama, In Justice, Kyle MacLachlan heads a team of keen young sleuths fighting to right wrongs as an agency called the National Justice Project. These guys aren't out to nail the perp but to set the falsely accused free.

One case, which has not been mentioned in the show so far, is that of the ever dapper MacLachlan himself, sentenced forever to play the quirky guy after his stellar TV debut as the super shiny FBI Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks. Along the way to cracking the grisly case of "Who Killed Laura Palmer?", MacLachlan somehow managed to play the straight foil in a town of weirdos and someone who was more eccentric than the lot of them put together.

MacLachlan's taste in shows thereafter appeared as finely honed as Agent Cooper's instinct for a "damn fine" cherry pie. He was on hit comedy Sex and the City as Charlotte's perfect surgeon husband - perfect, that is, except for being impotent and having a possessive mother called Bunny.

More recently, he has infiltrated Desperate Housewives as the mad dentist in last season's finale: yes, yet another of the homicidal maniacs who seem to like to buzz around Bree.

But he has always appeared under-used compared with his first outing in American northwest where "the owls are now what they seem".

Perhaps there's a chance he will be liberated in In Justice. But so far, this looks like standard telly crime drama, with MacLachlan just the quirky addendum to its attractive young cast of idealists.

From crime to the courts: the lawyers were in for a bit of satisfying comeuppance in City Cowboys, a reality offering from ITV which dug six legal beagles out of their lairs in London and put them on a ranch in Texas, trying to turn them into rodeo stars in just two weeks.

It was a cut above the usual fish-out-of-water reality shows. So lawyers are the cowboys of the courts? See how they fare thrown to the leather-faced, moustached Texan cowboys who were all too ready to live up to the southern redneck, hard ridin' stereotype. "Ever had yo' ass eaten?" one asked the particularly soft-looking opera-singing nancy barrister called Tim.

Boss Bob made it plain where the legal profession stands in the Lone Star State: "lawyers don't have a good reputation round here".

There might well be hard men of the bar in London but they did not appear represented here. Andrew said he "gets nervous when a cat looks at me aggressively".

Tim stole the show in his quest to prove he wasn't really a "drip". You had to hand it to him, after a hard day's riding he was obviously in excruciating pain but didn't lose the stiff upper lip even when the boss whipped his ass - literally - for being late into camp. "Back home folks pay a fortune for such treatment," he managed to quip.

More than anything else Tim wanted to be a rodeo hero in front of his two boys. But the more adept lasso didn't want him on the team, Caspar, in particular, proving why legal clerks have a tyrannical reputation.

The irony, of course, was Cowboy Bob had a much finer sense of justice than the lawyers. Bob was adamant that Tim, hopeless though he was, would make the team and get his chance to shine in Britain's finest dirty half-dozen.

His hunch paid off, at least in terms of good television. "That was better than sex," said Tim, after he finally scored a success in the team calf-penning competition. That's the kind of kinky thing that happens when lawyers get too much leather.