Conviction: The Complete Series

very funny and intersting show .. love it very much .. i hope that we can season 2 sooon :)

great series. all my favorite characters from law and order. more about the D.A's and their lives so their characters are explored much more. very enjoyable.

NBC put this show on Doomsday: Friday night. Any show on network TV Fridays is fighting an uphill battle. At least nowadays. I even think it would have lasted longer had it been on Sunday nights.

Conviction follows the story of an NYC prosecutor's office. The bureau chief is Stephanie Cabot (?) from SVU. Under her are, I think, six other prosecutors. This story follows their lives and cases.

The characters were OK; the actors seemed to mesh well, although they all weren't that likeable. I didn't care for (forgive me, don't recall their names) the baby-faced kid that got mugged, the DA under Cabot, and his gf the dark-haired girl. All three seemed devoid of personalities and it was difficult to relate to them. I did like Finn, Billy, and the guy played by Eric Balfour.

The stories weren't original at all, and it did have a soap feel to it. It was a watchable attempt though. Aside from Cabot, you wouldn't really have been able to associate this with the L&O franchise. I watched maybe 3 or 4 episodes, and then for some reason, NBC kept preempting it. When it came back, I had lost interest.

I'm going to get the DVD b/c I want to see what happened.

So don't go into it looking for a fresh look at the law world and the lives of lawyers. This ain't it.

Just a copy of every other legal drama out there. No wonder it was canceled. A complete waste of time. I have no idea why they would spend good money to put this out on DVD. Who would buy it, besides the friends and relatives of those involved?

Watching the 13 episodes on this DVD, it's quite easy to come up with a theory as to why the show never made it past the first season. For what it's worth, my guess is that the characters - with the exception of Nick Potter (played by Jordan Bridges) and Chris Finn (played by Julianne Nicholson) - were just all so patently difficult to like and/or identify with. Even Alexandra Cabot (played by the brilliant Stephanie March) who was really one to watch when she was on earlier seasons of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" has now climbed a few steps up the career ladder (she's now Bureau Chief, "the boss", as she seems to relish in telling us) and become a "self-important b***h" (not my words, but the words of a colleague in one particularly tragic episode of the show) and to be honest, 13 episodes was about as much as I could stand. If they had gone on to make season two, I doubt I would have watched it.

Another huge personal disappointment with this DVD was with the music. The show had some really good music that would come on towards the end of each episode and I was really hoping the DVD would have details of the people whose music was used. I know they used stuff by popular musicians because I heard Coldplay, James Blunt and Amos Lee among a few others that escape me at the minute. I also know that there's a way the producers are able to use people's music and not credit them at the end of the show; "Homicide: Life on the Street" did it too but at least they gave us details in the DVD extras. It's a glaring omission in my book.

That said, in all other respects this is a brilliant legal drama as one would expect from Dick Wolf and it's this that redeems the DVD set. It's what makes it worth buying if you didn't see it when it originally aired. The cases and characters are realistic and the show is well written, well acted and directed. The season finale starring Gbenga Akinnagbe, an actor whose work I'm really enjoying on HBO's "The Wire" at the moment, was a classic hour of high tension. I remember watching it though and, apart from one or two exceptions, not really caring which way things went. That's when it dawned on me why I didn't like the show as much as I could have. I just wish they had bestowed a bit more humanity on the main characters. I didn't know prosecuting lawyers could be so cold, arrogant, unfeeling, miserable and acutely self-obsessed - and I've been watching all manner of legal drama for over 20 years now.

So in short: Very enjoyable drama; shame about the main characters in it.