One job just isn't enough for 'Law and Order' star Thompson

He'll star in the spinoff while keeping his role on the parent show.
SCRIPPS HOWARD
Fred Thompson, the former senator from Tennessee, is pulling double duty again.
Beginning tonight, Thompson will play District Attorney Arthur Branch on the highly anticipated spinoff "Law & amp; Order: Trial by Jury" while remaining on its parent show, "Law & amp; Order."
This isn't Thompson's first moonlighting gig. Near the end of his Senate term in 2002, Thompson divided his time between politics and acting on "Law & amp; Order."
He eventually chose between the two. Thompson didn't run again and devoted his time to playing Branch on the NBC drama.
"Compared to my time that I was in the Senate, I still have quite a bit more time off now," he says. "When I was doing the one show, I would go over and work half a day. Now I can go over and do the other show, and I work a full day."
Thompson, 62, who has homes in Washington, D.C., and Nashville, Tenn., usually hops a shuttle for his commute to New York City, where "Law & amp; Order" is shot.
"Trial by Jury," which will air at 10 p.m. Fridays, is the third spinoff in the "Law & amp; Order" family.
Additional point of view
Unlike other "Law & amp; Order" shows, the new series is told not only from the point of view of the prosecutors and police, but also from the perspective of the defense attorneys, defendants, judges and jurors.
It shows the inner workings of the judicial system, from the arraignment, to the prosecutors' complicated process of building a case to investigating leads and preparing witnesses for trial.
The cast includes Bebe Neuwirth ("Cheers") and Amy Carlson ("Third Watch"). The late Jerry Orbach will be seen as his "Law & amp; Order" character, Lennie Briscoe, in early episodes.
Kirk Acevedo ("Band of Brothers") also stars as Briscoe's partner.
While Thompson relishes the insider perspective that "Trial by Jury" will bring, he says his friends in the legal profession love to rib him about the lack of authenticity of "Law & amp; Order."
"Sometimes you have to do shorthand to move the story along," says Thompson, who earned his law degree from Vanderbilt University in Nashville. "But usually it's just as easy to do it the right way.
"A lot of the writers are lawyers, and we have a lot of consultants also. Having lived that life, I have my own take on [matters] a lot of times."
Viewer's perspective
When it comes to the complicated legal entanglements in the story, Thompson's actor side wins out. "I try to put myself in the seat of the viewer," he says. "I always think of my wife on these things.
"She's very astute and was a 'Law & amp; Order' fan long before I was. So I always wonder if she'd want to know these [legal] details while she's watching the show. Many of the fans of the show are very well educated women."
Sometimes viewers shouldn't be burdened with the complicated legal side of the law, even on a primetime series, he says.
However, now that he's been with "Law & amp; Order" for more than three seasons, he says he's able to voice his opinion more freely.
"We talk about the scripts more than we used to," Thompson says. "They ask me to throw my two cents in more than they used to."
He's glad that writers on the show are asking for his insight.
"It is to all of our best interests for the show to be good," he says. "We want things [to be] legally [correct] ... if not 100 percent [right]."