Proven Innocent plays like a hybrid between a conventional legal procedural and the short-form crime series that has become such a big part of contemporary TV.
Proven Innocent, which debuts Friday at 9 p.m. ET on Fox, is fully traditional in at least one sense: Its creators, producers, and performers would like it to become a hit and run forever.
The premise, which has attorney Madeline Scott (Rachel Lefevre, top) fronting a legal team whose goal is to free people wrongfully convicted of crimes, would lend itself to as many episodes as there are scenarios for wrongful conviction. That’s a big number.
Innocent victims of a flawed justice system share their spotlight, however, with Madeline’s own drama.
It seems the reason she got into this socially conscious game is that once upon a time she and her brother Levi (Riley Smith) were convicted of a murder they did not commit.
The victim was Madeline’s best friend, Rosemary Lynch (Casey Tutton), and the problem was that Levi and Madeline found the body.
The prosecutor who nailed them was Gore Bellows (Kelsey Grammer, top), a well-connected and ambitious fellow who now happens to be running for Illinois state attorney general.
Madeline burns to prove Bellows has bent, twisted and mutilated the law in many cases, as a way to play to the cheap seats and build his political image.
Madeline also doesn’t care who knows about her obsession with taking him down, including Bellows and her boss Ezekiel Boudreau (Russell Hornsby, above, with Lefevre).
Bellows isn’t worried. Boudreau is. He fears Madeline’s determination may at times conflict with the best interests of their client, or at the very least pull Madeline’s eye off the ball.
This isn’t the first time a police/crime/legal drama has given our lead character a troubling unsolved mystery that leaves a terrible loose end in his or her life. Castle and The Mentalist come to mind.
In those and most other cases, though, the personal story has been a shadow in the background. While it would occasionally come to the forefront and affect a case, it generally was more like a reassuring motif, something viewers knew would always be there and might or might not be resolved when the series ended.
Madeline’s concern feels more immediate, like it’s really the costar of the show. The murder of Rosemary Lynch, never solved, hangs over both Madeline’s head and the heads of many local townspeople, who aren’t at all convinced Madeline didn’t do it.
Madeline doesn’t shy away from pushing back at that sentiment. She tells one catty ex-friend that sometimes she misses being in prison because if someone said something inflammatory in there, she could just beat her up.
Lefevre gives Madeline the right mix of compassion and resentment-fueled toughness, while Grammer plays Bellows as maybe not quite the full-on villain Madeline sees. Maybe, maybe not.
Lefevre, Grammer, and Hornsby are ably supported by a cast that includes law firm workers Violet Bell (Nikki M. James) and Bodie Quick (Vincent Kartheiser) plus a Chicago Daily Post reporter named Dylan (David Alpay), whose involvement may be more complicated than it first appears.
Proven Innocent comes out of the gate with a few script issues. Some legal and other plot points are resolved a little too neatly, perhaps in service of establishing the characters.
The larger challenge going forward may be to keep the balance between the weekly innocence cases and Madeline’s run at Gore. It’s not a crime to have two alpha plotlines. It just makes your case harder to sell.