By Jesse Cataldo
Conviction, NBC’s new prime-time drama, is a Law & Order spin-off minus the brand name, yet it shares a lot less with its predecessor than might be expected.
First off, there’s no order. Conviction focuses entirely on a group of young New York City assistant DA’s working under bureau chief Alexandra Cabot (Stephanie March). Cabot, a holdover from Special Victims Unit, provides the requisite character link to the mother series.
The rest of the prosecutors, all relatively new to the job, are an ethnically pleasing mix of blandly well-dressed Manhattan professionals, full of pep and uniformly attractive.
This is where the biggest difference lies. There are no gruff, street-wise pros to lead by example.
The only face above 40 in sight is knocked off in the first half-hour, in the kind of gunned down partner mold that’s launched a thousand action movies.
But from the beginning it’s evident that Conviction is heading in a different direction, even reaching for a different audience than the series that spawned it. Even now Law & Order remains something of an old-fashioned police drama, digging deep into the city’s seedy underbelly with sleeves rolled up to the elbows.
Conviction plumbs the same territory, but at the same time strives for a kind of sleek sterility with quick cuts, a cool soundtrack and a smugly self-satisfied center that contrasts the world-weariness of the original.
Basically, Conviction glides along in a freshly pressed suit with a mineral water, in the way that L&O operates with a cigarette and a ratty blazer.
The early murder of the group’s mentor, killed during a drug dealer’s murder trial, is an attempt to pull the gritty drama of the streets alongside the relatively contained safeness of the courtroom and to add a measure of external tension.
With that established, the show now needs to use that tension as fuel for the rest of the series.
This leads us to Nick Potter (Jordan Bridges), whose first day on the job is fraught with complications, including a clue about the killing that he ends up hiding to protect himself.
Also involved in the fallout is James Steele (Anson Mount), the already pissed-off firebrand who we can tell plays by his own rules.
Added to this ensemble of stock characters is oversexed bad-boy Brian Peluso (Eric Balfour) who reveals his softer side as he pines over an ex. Lessons are of course learned, as the awkward, scatterbrained cutie (Julianne Nicholson as Christina Finn) learns what not to do as she tries her first case, and Billy Desmond (J. August March) discovers the emotional toll that the job can take.
As it stands after the premiere, Conviction is too hip, too clean and ultimately too easy for its own good.
While it retains some of the spark of its source material, the final product ends up feeling like a watered-down imitation.