Monday, take time instead of crime
The choice couldn’t be more clear.
In the battle for eyes on Monday night between ABC’s new procedural, “Conviction,” and NBC’s time-traveling mystery, “Timeless,” the peacock beats the mouse hands down.
The last hour of Monday prime time has presented challenges for the broadcast networks over the years. NBC tried “Pan Am,” and that didn’t work. It tried “Smash,” and that crashed and burned
after a strong start and some misguided course adjustments. NBC finally scored with “The Black List,” which was strong enough to move into the shark-infested waters of Thursday nights. CBS essayed “Hostages” in 2013, but it was up against “The Black List” and couldn’t survive. The networks have often tried and failed to find the right fit for what should be a coveted time slot.
NBC just may have done it with “Timeless,” an action fantasy whipped up by Eric Kripke (“Supernatural”) and Shawn Ryan (“The Shield”) about warring time machines, but with all kinds of mysterious loose ends to ensure a healthy launch on Monday, Oct. 3.
Lucy Preston (Abigail Spencer) is dragooned by Homeland Security to hop into a time-traveling jalopy with widowed soldier Wyatt Logan (Matt Lanter) and coder Rufus Carlin (Malcolm Barrett) to go back in time to chase a group of bad guys who have stolen the more advanced time machine and headed back to New Jersey on May 6, 1937, the day the Hindenburg exploded.
The big thing about going back in time, though — beyond the fact that no one’s managed to do it yet — is that you can’t make any changes during your trip because doing so would have long-lasting and perhaps catastrophic effects on history. It’s kind of like, if the butterfly didn’t flap its wings in Brazil, there wouldn’t be a tsunami in the Pacific.
The other hitch is that once you go back in history, you can’t make a return trip because you’d meet yourself, theoretically, and that wouldn’t be good.
Zipping back to the ’30s in the clunky prototype of the time machine, Lucy, Wyatt and Rufus try to stop the bad guys from altering what happened when the Hindenburg dirigible floated toward a landing in New Jersey. The dialogue is snappy and witty, as is the direction. When the team has to persuade the military to help them stop the lead bad guy, they say he’s escaped from a mental hospital. Lucy identifies Wyatt as Dr. Dre and herself as Nurse Jackie.
The pilot’s finale asks more questions than it answers, including who’s good and who’s up to no good in the scheme of things.
The show probably would work better an hour earlier, but wherever NBC puts it, it’s worth finding.
If anyone has ever thought about creating a parody of a typical ABC drama, they needn’t bother: The network has already done that — countless times. The latest effort is called “Conviction,” an overheated, overwritten and implausible story also premiering Monday, Oct. 3.
Hayley Atwell, so good in “Agent Carter,” is sadly misused here as Hayes Morrison, who is busted for cocaine possession and blackmailed by the handsome, ambitious D.A. into heading a new unit to look into past convictions to find out if the wrong people were thrown in jail.
As the daughter of a former U.S. president and whose mom is running for the Senate, Hayes might suggest a similarity to Chelsea Clinton, except that even the most die-hard Trump supporter wouldn’t believe that the real former first daughter was known as the campus “bike” at law school, slept with several students while teaching law, and has had her nude photos from a beach in Belize grace the tabloids and the Internet.
While it’s great to see that what’s sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose in the sex department, creators Liz Friedman and Liz Friedlander have gone way overboard making Hayes Morrison as preposterous as possible. She doesn’t want her new job, and as far as she’s concerned, her team can do the work while she hangs out in Hawaii.
Her team includes Sam Spencer (Shawn Ashmore), who was supposed to get the job as head of the new Conviction Integrity Unit; former cop Maxine Bohen (Merrin Dungey); ex-con and forensics expert Frankie Cruz (Manny Montana); and Tessa Larson (Emily Larson), whom Hayes calls “Tinker Belle.”
The pilot focuses on the case of a high school football star named Odell Dwyer (Maurice Williams), convicted of killing his girlfriend.
D.A. Connor Wallace (Eddie Cahill) has given the CIU five days total to review each case and either recommend retrial or let the conviction stand. Five days, of course, is just perfect for a weekly episodic dramatic series. In addition to the over-caffeinated, percussive soundtrack, the show is pushed along by periodic announcements of how many days are left for the CIU to solve the case.
Beneath all the excesses of Hayes’ character, including her politically ambitious mother’s (Bess Armstrong) manipulation of her daughter’s life and career, “Conviction” is a run-of-the-mill, standard cold-case procedural, very much in the vein of, well, “Cold Case” and other team procedurals like “CSI” and “Criminal Minds.”
The only difference is bilious writing, along the lines of this choice line from the former first daughter herself: “Why be the fox guarding the henhouse when I can be the wolf who mauls the fox and anyone else who gets in my way?”
Sounds to me like her chickens need to come home to roost. And speaking of farm animals, the pilot makes use of a pig’s carcass to solve the crime. The show’s only surprise is that, given that it’s ABC, no one thought to put lipstick on it.