In the US: Mondays, 10/9c, ABC
In the UK: Acquired by Sky Living. Will air in November
This is not a paying job. I try to keep the ads to a minimum. I ignore the now daily requests for ‘native advertising’ (“I am interested in publishing an article on your website which will be relevant to the theme of your website and am happy to suggest some topics to you”) – they are not for me. I want this place to stay classy.
That does mean everything on TMINE has to fit round the stuff I actually do get paid for, though, so I don’t always have the time to do everything I’d like to do. Like proof-read. You probably noticed that.
Anyway, right now, all things being equal, I’d be getting out my copy of Adobe Illustrator CC to design a cracking mock up of an Ikea illustration in which a rather large number of bog standard parts are put together to assemble a television that looks exactly the same as any other television. Maybe I’d even make a video of it being assembled in Premiere.
But I don’t have the time to do that. Instead, I’ll have to paint a picture of Conviction with mere words.
Imagine basically any ensemble procedural show in which you have a crack team of lawyers/doctors/antelope wranglers, all the top of their respective fields, all representing at least one aspect of diversity, but each with one specific issue that none of the others has. They’ll work very hard each week to solve whatever the problem is, because they care so very, very hard and are just so, so brilliant. But they’ll work extra hard if in some way the problem of the week touches on their issue.
However, said show can’t be something like Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, Chicago PD or Chicago Justice. No, it has to be the specific sub-variety of “brilliant but damaged leaders who speak their minds” shows, where the show is really about the leader and everyone else is subversient to him or her, no matter how racist they are. Think Shark. Think House.
In fact, specifically think House because Conviction‘s co-creator is Liz Friedman, last seen being played by the ridiculously marvellous Hudson Leick on the equally ridiculously marvellous Hercules: The Legendary Journeys episode Yes, Virginia, There Is A Hercules. No, really – watch for a couple of minutes and you’ll see what I mean.
Anyone, she was a producer on House so knows how to do these things backwards.
And now, you’ve got Conviction in which Hayley Atwell (Marvel’s Agent Carter) plays the messed up genius who heads the team of underlings who work hard every episode to prove her right. She’s the daughter of a former president, she used to be a DA with a 95% prosecution rate, then she became a law professor. Then she started taking cocaine and shagging all her students. Oops.
Anyway, DA Eddie Cahill – whose greying temples make me feel so old because I remember him when he was Rachel’s ‘toy boy’ boyfriend on Friends – lets her off, provided she head up his new unsafe convictions unit. Her job is to make sure everyone in prison should be in prison, the theory being that it takes a coke-addict bad girl to spot a coke-addict bad girl. At first, she takes it as sinecure. But soon, she begins to enjoy the job.
And that’s all you really need to know. It is absolutely generic procedural TV. Atwell, who’s forced to deploy an exceedingly wobbly American accent, clearly accepted Conviction as a lifeboat role when Agent Carter was being cancelled. There’s certainly no artistic merit to it, nothing remarkable about it, other than the idea that the only unique thing a female leader could offer is cleavage and an ability to party. I’m not sure that’s a selling point.
Of course, Atwell can’t actually be truly heartless in the same way as Gregory House is, because she’s a woman so wouldn’t be likable. So there have to be signs she cares and she’s touched when mothers demand she care about their innocent/dead sons and daughters. Little tears and everything.
Legal insights are also minimal and there are attempts to steal from any other crime show that’s passing in the hope that something might be popular – we even have some CSI-ing by lawyers, in which they take a pig carcass out into the woods at night to see if there are any flies on it in the morning. Guess what, idiots: either you scared the flies away or you didn’t wait the several days necessary for the eggs to hatch, none of it’s admissable and you could have just asked a forensic scientist. So why did you spend an entire night in the woods with a pig carcass, you great steaming twats?
Anyway, insert tab A into slot A, take flange B and attach it to nozzle C. Now you’ve built your own Conviction, you don’t need to take this one home.
