Kate Walsh is very, very good. Bad Judge, sadly, isn't. But it could have been. Originally conceived by Will Ferrell's famed sidekick Adam McCay (and executive produced by Ferrell), Bad Judge was no doubt originally designed to follow in the footsteps of Bad Teacher and Bad Santa. It likely would have been very good at that, with Walsh in the lead supported by Ryan Hansen (Veronica Mars, Party Down), an actor who's so good with his face that he can get a laugh just by entering a room or raising an eyebrow to the point where you wonder if that might be his gimmick… but then he's just as good when it's his turn to talk, and you realize the guy's just fundamentally funny. That makes him a perfect compliment to Walsh, who sports a similar skill set, although in contrast to Hansen's laid-back hilarity she's at her comic best when pushed into neurotic frenzy.

Alas, the network panicked and instead of a lovably deplorable anti-hero, we have a nurturing, largely generic leading lady. Walsh is so good she saves a lot of it, but the show has an identity crisis even she can't solve, as half the episode was re-shot to make her into this new, loving character and half of it was left over from her days as a me-first hedonist. The show runner responsible for the pilot has already been fired, and replaced, so there will soon be yet a third interpretation on the table. Hopefully it will be one that tips the show in one direction or the other, as the leads are strong enough to make it work as either… but it can't survive as both.

That's speculative, though. For now, we have the pilot. Walsh is a veteran actress who's most recently been doing drama (Fargo) but co-starred in one of the all-time great 2000s sitcom arcs as a spontaneous, combative love interest on Norm (her first appearance is in "Norm vs. Jenny" from season two for those of you who're curious). Her comic timing has only improved, and she somehow manages to sell Rebecca Wright as both a depraved/dysfunctional cautionary tale and as a caring nurturer, at least as much as can reasonably be expected given the circumstances; we kinda have to grade on a curve here. She manages to make Rebecca believable, even if Rebecca's actions aren't. She shares most of her screen time either with Hansen (killing it as a horndog doctor who seems to make his living almost exclusively as an expert witness) or some stupid little kid played by yet another bad child actor in a Fall TV slate full of them (though he's better than most of the kids on Black-Ish), Gotham's Camren Bicondova exempted.

If Walsh and Hansen are great, Walsh's courtroom nemesis Tom Barlow (John Ducey) and defendant (Chris Partnell) are at least pretty good, and nobody's really bad except for the child actor that hopefully won't be back every episode. The jokes are largely mediocre, though there are a few strong comic moments (one of bigamist Parnell's wives echoing the other's claim that he was always there for her when she was sick or needed him… then ruefully adding an exception for those times when the other wife was sick and needed him is the first bit that pops into mind, but there were a few others). Tone Loc as Walsh's wise-cracking bailiff is just stereotypical "oh no she didn't" supporting black guy enough to raise the red flag, but is otherwise fine and we have decades of sitcom history showing us that supporting characters who start off as one-dimensional stereotypes can occasionally grow into some of the strongest characters on their respective shows given time and good writing.

Bad Judge may not get either. The reviews are savage, and with a new creative head coming in, the writing is an unknown commodity (though it's unlikely to get much worse unless they're borrowing "talent" from MLS). The show as it stands now is bad, but even in the dumpster fire that is the pilot, it showed that there's a version of it that's very good. Walsh is too good for the pilot's incarnation of the show, and so is Hansen, but I'd love to see what they could do on a show that knew what it was, and what it did. Fingers crossed that the new creative head drops the kid (semi-written out at the end of the pilot anyway), picks a tone, and gives the extremely talented leads something to work with.

Bad Judge is bad right now, but the people who made it that way are gone. I'm going to give it some time and see if it can turn things around. I need to believe, because we're now five sitcoms in and none of them are especially good (though Selfie comes the closest), and with Cristela and The McCarthys as two of our four potential saviors, we need all the hope we can get. In Walsh we trust.