---

If the new legal drama Shark fails to draw an audience, the salesmanship of actor James Woods will not be the reason.

Woods, cast as a bombastic defense attorney-turned-prosecutor on the series that airs this fall on CBS, spent Saturday promoting Shark to the nation's TV critics like his mortgage depended on it. First he held forth at length the press conference for long stretches, then spent three solid hours that evening at the CBS party at the Rose Bowl, glad-handing critics on the stadium turf and talking a mile a minute into their tape recorders, sometimes hammy, sometimes deadly serious. As they say in sports, he left everything on the field. A sampling:

Why is he switching from movies to TV? "I'm always offered (films) to do," Woods explains, "but I don't want to play the middle-aged guy in a suit who is the head of the evil corporation."

What does he think of lawyers today? "The California Bar Association has an ethics hotline — do you know about this?" he said. "You need a hotline to tell you whether you're right or wrong? You don't have a conscience? How about a conscience? They're cheaper." But, said a reporter, your character doesn't care about right or wrong. He tells his attorneys that's God's problem, not theirs. "I believe, fundamentally, people know in their gut what is right and what is wrong," Woods said. "But you've got to filter it through a very awkward judicial system — that will be the drama."

Does he think viewers are will embrace a callous, self-absorbed jerk as a hero? "It's a little bit like House. I really like that character a lot. And you have to work to like that character a bit."[[In-content Ad]]

---