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PROSECUTORS ON A ROLL: CONVICTION,
CLOSE TO HOME, AND LAW & ORDER
By Michael Asimow
Televised pop culture concentrates
on only one side of the criminal justice process. Prosecutors,
police, and police forensics rule the roost. Countless TV series
glorify those who toil for law enforcement. Defense lawyers have
virtually disappeared from the airwaves, except as weasels who
get trounced by the prosecutors. The traditional noble defender,
running from Perry Mason and The Defenders through
Matlock to L. A. Law and The Practice, seems
to be on life support. Alan Shore on Boston Legal occasionally
attempts a bit of criminal defense, but those cynical and obviously
parodied stories do little to enhance the image of the criminal
defense bar. The tenacious attorneys on Injustice challenge
the past convictions of innocent defendants. But that's about
it for the defense side.
What's going on here? What
explains this swing of the pendulum in favor of crime-fighting?
Are viewers so terrified by crime that they're only interested
in police, forensic scientists, and prosecutors? Yet violent
crime rates are far below those of ten or twenty years ago. Do
most viewers detest criminal defense lawyers? Well, probably
so, but they've felt that way for years, so what's changed? Are
people terrified that guilty people are getting acquitted? Maybe,
but there's been far more recent publicity about innocent people
being convicted and later exonerated by DNA testing (a development
that Injustice shrewdly capitalizes on). In a time of
war, do viewers want to be assured that government knows what
it's doing? Yet the President's approval ratings are dismal and
people seem to distrust government more than ever. Is it blowback
from 9/11? Yet it's hard to see the connection between terrorist
atrocities and the normal routine of urban street crime.
Whatever the reason, the message
from pop culture is that the cops, police forensic scientists,
and prosecutors are noble and fascinating creatures who have
all the right answers, while those on the defense side are faintly
repugnant toads who, at best, merit protection under the Endangered
Species Act. This highly opinionated article focuses on two new
prosecutor dramas, Conviction and Close to Home,
comparing them to that mainstay of police/prosecutor sanctification,
Law & Order.
In Conviction, Dick
Wolf creates a prosecution office as different from Law &
Order as it could possibly be. We see an ensemble of impossibly
good looking and extremely horny 20- and 30-somethings on a crusade
against crime and sleeping alone. Like The Practice and
LA Law before it, Conviction is a workplace drama
in which the personal lives of the characters center on their
place of employment. Clearly, Wolf was stung by the sudden death
of his previous series Law & Order: Trial by Jury
(which I, for one, thought was excellent) as well as by a ratings
decline in the flagship Law & Order. Conviction
attacks the prized 18-49 demographic with gusto. Of course, it
also helped in selling the series that the new show was able
to use the costly sets built for Law & Order: Trial by
Jury.
 Every
episode of Law & Order, you'll recall, has an identical
structure. Each concerns only a single case. In the first half
hour, typical New Yorkers stumble on a dead body. Inspired police
investigation turns up the real killer. In the second half, prosecutor
Jack McCoy and his female associate convict them. The cops and
prosecutors have no life outside the office and do little socializing
even there (there are the occasional brief congratulatory bar
scenes at the end of the episode where McCoy gets to make an
ironic point about the proceedings). With rare exceptions, nothing
is said about the characters' personal lives (at the most, we
get a tantalizingly brief glimpse of their problems with family
or alcoholism). It's all work. Turnover in the cast makes little
difference to the show's appeal because it's all about the stories,
not the actors.
I'm a fan of Law & Order.
The stories are well written, often very thought-provoking, sophisticated,
and complex. A recent show, for example, raised issues of great
importance about the use of private security contractors in fighting
the Iraq war and the lack of any system for holding private contractors
accountable. That episode featured a lefty defense lawyer, Danielle
Melnick, who has appeared repeatedly on Law & Order
and clashed entertainingly with McCoy, but who seems to care
more about the cause than her client. The writers are lawyers
themselves and they strive to achieve legal accuracy.
To me, the phenomenal commercial
success of Law & Order is baffling: there's no sex
or violence and the show never dumbs itself down or underestimates
the viewers' intelligence. If you doze off or get up to answer
the phone or go to the bathroom, you're going to lose the thread
of the story. As a result, Law & Order seems to flout
every conventional rule for success in the world of mass media,
yet old episodes play every day on cable while new episodes continue
to appear on NBC. Although I can't account for its success, I
appreciate the high quality of the show and I watch it religiously.
 Close
to Home is more like
the Law & Order narrative model than that used in
Conviction. The show is set in Indianapolis, a big city
with plenty of crime but lacking the grit and glamour of Manhattan
or L. A. It focuses on a single dedicated prosecutor, the highly
attractive Annabeth Chase and her supervisor, a black woman named
Maureen Scofield. Like Law & Order, each episode of
Close to Home concerns only a single case (often involving
some form of domestic violence), so the story can be developed
in some depth and there are interesting plot twists. Unlike the
celibates on Law & Order, however, Chase has a personal
life. She's married, has a baby, and is just returning from maternity
leave. She also has a very supportive husband who is a full child-care
partner and is happy to step in to help when Chase has to rush
to the office in the middle of the night or on weekends.
A recent story involved an
interesting Miranda issue in which the suspect never quite told
the detective interrogating him that he wanted a lawyer but kept
asking whether he needed one. It also involved a canny defense
lawyer who successfully bluffs the prosecutors into accepting
a plea bargain in a winnable case. I like Close to Home,
but it's nowhere near as well written as Law & Order.
My sense is that the scenes involving Chase's struggle to balance
home and work are thin and artificial, grafted onto the legal
story just to show that she's a human being and, perhaps, to
appeal to a female young-working-mother demographic.
 Which
brings us to Conviction. Here each episode presents three
to five cases, intercutting between them throughout the hourly
show along with personal tidbits about the lawyers. The multi-story
format has some advantages and a big disadvantage. The major
advantage is that it allows most members of the ensemble to play
important roles in each episode. Another advantage is that the
format represents the reality of a prosecutor's office: everybody
is rushing around trying to cover the caseload. New cases pour
in, the pace is frantic, and mistakes get made. Lawyers have
to spend precious time trying to get witnesses to appear at trial
and not chicken out on the testimony they promised to give. (Jessica
Rossi gives a prostitute $50 for a heroin fix in order to get
her to court to testify against a rapist). Cases fizzle out because
witnesses are found to have lied to the police. Most of the others
get plea bargained. Only a few make it to trial. This approach
gives a genuine sense of the way an urban prosecutor's office
functions. The Law & Order and Close To Home
model of devoting all of the office's resources to a single high
profile case is a stylized way of telling a story in depth, but
it's not realistic.
The disadvantage of the multi-story
format, however, is that none of the stories on Conviction
are well developed, because there just isn't time for it. You'll
forget them by the next morning. So if you're looking for sophisticated
and challenging legal and ethical stories (and I am), Conviction
will probably be rather disappointing, the cultural equivalent
of fast food.
But the show has some strong
points. I liked the emphasis in several stories on rookie Nick
Potter, who has just arrived at the office from a Wall St. firm
because he wants to try cases (young people in big firms never
try cases or even meet with clients and even senior litigation
partners almost never get to trial). Yet Nick doesn't have a
clue what he's supposed to be doing and is the subject of good
natured hazing by his colleagues. Nick also finds himself in
a dilemma when he witnesses police brutality while on a ride-along
with the cops. In the subsequent Internal Affairs investigation,
he must decide whether to tell the whole truth (and get the cops
fired) or pull his punches (so he can continue working with them
for the rest of his career).
Christina Finn is terrified
when she tries her first case, especially when the judge makes
and then sustains objections to her leading questions. (She's
also cruelly hazed by the judge for leaving the evidence-cocaine-on
her desk during the lunch break). Busy prosecutorial offices
always have rookies who must be trained and brought along slowly
and acculturated into the office's institutional life. And when
a prosecutor with an organized crime case is gunned down in the
pilot episode (his dinner location perhaps disclosed by Nick's
incautious comment), I thought that made for effective drama
about the physical dangers of a prosecutor's life.
Also I don't mind experiencing
the personal lives of the characters when it illuminates their
work experience. Brian Peluso (who probably gets more face-time
than any other member of the ensemble) is a compulsive gambler
who owes money to his bookie. This entangles him in a serious
conflict of interest when his bookie pressures him to get Christina
to go easy on a gun case involving the bookie's relative. If
I'm to invite these characters into my living room for the long
haul, I'd like to get to know them as people. Thus I always enjoyed
the mixture of gritty criminal defense and unhappy personal lives
on The Practice, especially the way the writers managed
so often to link the two.
Another thing I liked about
the four Conviction episodes I've seen is that the bureau
chief, Alexandra Cabot, is politically ambitious and imposes
hard-line policies on the office in order to project an image
of being tough-on-crime. Serious juvenile criminals must be prosecuted
as adults. No pleading down drug cases or gun crimes. The results
of such policies can be very harsh. An apparently intelligent
and reasonably decent 14-year old boy kills his bullying big
brother with a baseball bat. Office policy prevents the prosecutors
from treating this tragic case as a juvenile matter. The kid
must be tried as an adult. The prosecutors offer manslaughter
and 8 years, but the kid's father (having lost one son and threatened
now by losing another) won't let him accept the deal, assuring
him that he'll surely be acquitted of second degree murder. The
predictably tragic result ensues. But the office's policy of
insisting on prosecuting children who commit violent crimes as
adults is even more at fault for this unjust result than the
overbearing father. In this era of excessive criminal penalties
(such as three-strike laws and mandatory minimum sentences for
minor drug offenses) and ever-increasing prison populations,
I appreciate the show's effort to critique excessively harsh
prosecution and punishment policies.
And now for a few words on
the subject of sex. I personally like emphasis on the sexuality
of the characters in film or television drama when it is set
within an interesting and developing personal relationship and
is well integrated into the story. Take, for example, Six
Feet Under. That great show bristled with interesting sexual
relationships: Nate and Brenda. David and Keith. Ruth and George.
Claire and Billy. Federico and Vanessa. And many more. But on
Six Feet Under the sex was always part of a much bigger
personal story. I don't mind graphic language (indeed, I like
it when characters on HBO say fuck and shit, as real people do
all the time). I don't object to the occasional sight of normally
concealed body parts or seeing simulated intercourse when the
sex involves relationships between characters I've come to empathize
with.
However, the sex in Conviction
is different, somehow, and I've struggled to understand my reaction
to it. In Conviction, we see all of the prosecutors on
a roll-in the hay. Fundamentally, the show is a workplace drama
about a bunch of good-looking single people trying to get laid.
Several succeed in each episode, particularly Brian and Jessica.
Christina isn't very good at it and discovers potential partners
are happily married or prefer women with bigger boobs.
In this show, casual sex is
used to titillate viewers and appeal to the 18-49 demographic,
but it has little to do with the legal stories in the DA's office.
Wolf is obviously trying to capture a soap opera or Desperate
Housewives sensibility. As a definite non-member of the 18-49
demographic, I find the sexual banter and bedroom scenes in Conviction
boring and irrelevant. Not shocking (especially not in the laundered
form permitted on network TV), just tedious. I'm interested in
an intriguing legal story, and the sex just gets in the way.
But then that's my taste, not yours. Probably I'm just too last
century.
I can sympathize with Dick
Wolf's pursuit of the younger demographic and his attempt to
maintain his brand, but for provocative stories about law, lawyers
and ethics from a prosecutor's point of view, I'd stick with
Law & Order with a fallback to Close to Home.
Leave the sex to the soap operas. Meanwhile, how about bringing
back to the small screen some dedicated criminal defense lawyers
like those lovable bottom feeders on The Practice?
Posted April 5, 2006
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