O/T: How accurate are these legal series?

The Practice?
Boston Legal?

I'm no lawyer but Boston Legal seems pretty accurate to me. Can we put faith in our learnings of the law from these series? And movies?

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They're fairly accurate. The cases they deal with are often way more dramatic and entertaining than real cases. And of course things move a lot faster in the TV legal world than they do in real law. But David Kelley, who is an attorney himself, writes them so they'll be realistic rather than completely fictionalized. He often gets his ideas from real court cases and real news stories.

Yes the actual cases must be ficitional or dramatised, and obviously cases don't get solved in a single day, but if you did commit a crime, say murder, would you be able to relate your circumstances to the series to get an accurate prediction of the outcome?

They are absurdly innaccurate and laughable in all respects.

The defendent comes now before the court to say, and I really hate to agree with Mr. NSTassel, but he is correct, TV is TV and it aint close.

Pity. If there was a real-life Denny Krane then I think I'd like to meet him. William Shatner is superb in the role and no one could have done better.

Of course I understand that the series has improvised on the proceedings, etc. But say for example in an episode of Boston Legal the writers used a specific law in one of their ficitional cases (for example, the only witness in a key murder investigation is a catholic priest who, by law, cannot disclose the contents of the confession of the killer.) Would this view of the law be accurate in a real court of law?