IT'S BEEN nearly eight years since Julianna Margulies left NBC's "ER," and you could say that her return to the network series grind is as much accident as anything.

"I was very nervous and hesitant to go back to network television," Margulies told reporters last summer during a press conference for Fox's "Canterbury's Law," which finally premieres tonight.

"And actually, the truth of it is I got the pilot and a cover letter. I had the flu, and I opened it up. And the assistant who had written the cover letter said - it said FX, the O was missing, so I was incredibly excited to do cable. I had been looking to do a cable show," she said.

"I was like, finally a character I can play on television, but, of course, it's cable, so she's dark and it's complicated and she's complex and she's an adult . . . And 12, 13 episodes a year, I was - it was a shoo-in."

Oops.

If there's good news for Margulies, it's that thanks to "House," the line between Fox and its edgier cable sibling, FX, might not be as sharp as it once was, Hugh Laurie's pill-popping misanthrope of a doctor, Gregory House, having more than paved the way for Elizabeth Canterbury.

Canterbury, a cutthroat defense lawyer who trusts the system every bit as much as House trusts his patients (which is to say, not at all), is the kind of character Tina Fey might have been referring to when she told "Saturday Night Live" viewers last month that "bitch is the new black."

Like her FX counterpart, "Damages' " Patty Hewes (Glenn Close), she'll do whatever it takes to win, though their styles couldn't be more different: Margulies being all fire, Close ice.

"Rescue Me's" Denis Leary and his producing partner, Jim Serpico, are executive producers, and while I'm not always crazy about the way that particular FX series treats women, there's no question that Canterbury's been given nearly as much latitude as Leary gives himself on that show.

Like him, she's also been given at least one pretty good excuse for behaving badly, and it's the kind of thing that looms as large in her life as Sept. 11 looms in "Rescue Me's" Tommy Gavin's.

Still, it leads to adultery, and adultery, particularly a woman's adultery, is trickier on network television, where even the cheating Nico (Kim Raver) on "Lipstick Jungle" is dealing with the censure of her friends.

And she's not married to a character played by Aidan Quinn.

Fox, busy attempting to break up real-life marriages on "Moment of Truth," may not be concerned: It's scheduled "Canterbury's Law" for 8 p.m., and it's not as if it's any rougher than "Prison Break."

Margulies, who appears to have buried Nurse Hathaway - and her scrubs - for good, is a crackling presence in the courtroom and just about everywhere else.

Here's hoping "Canterbury's Law" lasts long enough to tire her out.

'Confidential,' confident

If there are any surprises in the series "High School Confidential," an eight-episode documentary series that launches at 10 tonight on WE, it might not be what a dozen girls said to filmmaker Sharon Liese over the course of four years in a Kansas high school, but how comfortable they seem saying it.

In next week's episode, for instance, a 10th-grader named Courtney, a church-loving cheerleader, discusses her belief that oral sex isn't that big a deal, as long as a couple have been going out a while, which in her mind means at least a month.

Maybe not so startling a revelation by today's standards, particularly since Courtney might at this point have been speaking hypothetically, and despite the slightly frozen smiles of her parents, seated on either side of her, I can't really feel sorry for them. Her mother appears to have brought it up.

"Confidential's" packaged so that most episodes follow only one or two girls from their freshman through senior years - the series was filmed from 2002-2006 - which means viewers dropping in for one or two episodes shouldn't have trouble catching up.

I can't say I was riveted by either of the episodes I watched, which largely consisted of interviews with the girls and their parents, together and separately, interspersed with scenes from extracurricular activities and parties.

But if there are parents who can actually get their teens to watch with them, it might get a conversation going.

Just be sure it's one you're ready to have. *

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