Aidan Quinn plays the husband of Julianna Margulies on the new Fox drama Canterbury’s Law.

FOX / ERIC LEIBOWITZ

Another lawyer joins the ranks of the Rhode Island bar. At least on TV.

Canterbury’s Law, a new short-run Fox series, premieres tonight at 8 on Channels 25 and 64. Julianna Margulies stars as the title character, Elizabeth Canterbury, whom the show describes as “a rebellious defense attorney who’s willing to bend the law in order to protect the wrongfully accused.”

While the story, created by Dave Erickson, who grew up in Raynham, Mass., is set in Rhode Island, the characters don’t speak with Rhode Island accents. That, Margulies said in a phone interview, was “a very conscious decision. I think it would have been a little bit much. People would have said, ‘Huh?’ ”

Margulies, who’s also the show’s producer, considers the drama to be of cable quality. She says it’s not “the formulaic network drama. It’s a little bit more realistic. It’s not tied up in little packages. It’s messy.”

Justice is relative. Characters are conflicted. Canterbury is married, but having an affair.

“It’s what makes her interesting. She’s sleeping with her private investigator. She doesn’t care about him. She just wants to feel something.”

Canterbury’s young child has gone missing.

“She’s numb and I think you’ll see her like this for a long time.”

The crux of the show is criminal law, and how it can consume those who practice it, especially women. Margulies speaks from first-hand exposure. Before filming, she spent three weeks watching federal prosecutors work in New York City.

“They are always at work. They were always preparing and they were always coming home late … I was seeing a pattern with these women. You try to have it all, and it’s not always feasible.”

Something’s got to give: marriages, relationships, career accomplishments, personal well being. Margulies recalls a verdict going against a female lawyer in New York. Margulies told the woman she was sorry, that her client seemed like a good guy.

“She turned and looked at me and said, ‘I’m so glad I didn’t win that case. That guy was scum of the earth and should be behind bars.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute. How do you deal with that?’ She said, ‘That’s my job.’ She couldn’t get emotionally attached to some of her cases. They were just her job. Others of them went home with her at night.”

Canterbury would do anything necessary for her case. The show’s pilot shows her going into a men’s bathroom to have a word with her urinating co-counsel.

“If it was me, I would have waited and waited and forgotten my point. This is a woman who gets what she wants. She’s incredibly pushy and bossy. She doesn’t care if anyone is in there. She wants to get what she’s after. So I kind of loved the idea that it’s just a bathroom. It’s just a guy peeing. This is what’s right. There’s a man’s life at stake.”

Margulies has appeared in movies, including Snakes on a Plane, The Darwin Awards and Slingshot, and on TV, in the comedy series Scrubs and, most notably, ER, where she played nurse Carol Hathaway for six years and won an Emmy.

She says she found preparing for a show about law easier than for one about medicine. She’d watched nurses work before portraying one on ER.

“I usually ended up in the hallway with my head between my legs. I was nauseous from watching an intubation.”

Also, Margulies found legalese more understandable than medicalese.

“I would look up in a dictionary what I was saying. I didn’t know what Demerol was until I tried it. With law, you can sit there and say, ‘you do this, you get this.’ You can understand what a sentence means.”

Margulies, 41, married last November and bore her first child in January. Shooting for the series, which took place in New York, began shortly after she learned she was pregnant. Work days were long, she says, sometimes involving 12 hours of shooting, followed by a few hours of preparation for the next day. Margulies had to prepare both as an actress and a producer.

“The work will suffer if we don’t figure out how to do enough B storylines so my character gets a little bit of a break and I get a little bit of a break. [That way] I can produce, star and have a life.”

This is Margulies’ first project as a producer. She was the one who suggested that Aidan Quinn, a friend of hers, play her husband on the show. But it was not her decision to set the show in Rhode Island. The writer, she said, decided that.

Dave Erickson is the writer, creator and co-executive producer of the show. He grew up in Raynham, Mass., and spent summers working in his father’s sub shops in Warwick, Bristol and East Greenwich.

“There is something about Providence, which has a rich heritage — the corruption, [former Providence Mayor Vincent A.] Cianci … the Mob,” Erickson says. “I don’t want the show to be about the notorious aspects of Rhode Island, but to some degree that was appealing.”

In the pilot, the skyline is not Providence, although a police cruiser is, and there’s a Rhode Island license plate on Canterbury’s car, a Porsche. The only Rhode Island town mentioned by name in the pilot is fictitious: Claremont.

If the show is picked up for a second season, Erickson says he’d like to introduce more aspects of Rhode Island, such as its accent and some shots of Providence neighborhoods to serve as place-setting transitions between scenes, but the series would continue to be shot in New York.

“I see Providence as a cosmopolitan city, especially since its renaissance. But it still has a provincial feel, which I don’t mean in a pejorative sense.” Erickson says he’d like to see more of Rhode Island in the show to “draw in a sense of the people I grew up with.”

brourke@projo.com