Conviction Review: Yes, Hayley Atwell’s Great, But Is She Enough?

In a promising fall season with shows like Pitch, This Is Us, and The Good Place, all of which had strong pilots and even stronger second episodes, it’s easy to forget that not all shows begin so perfectly. In fact, even critically acclaimed shows like Parks and Recreation have had rocky first episodes and sometimes entire first seasons.

That’s my way of saying let’s not hold it against Conviction that it premiered with an unusually strong fall crop and that its pilot flaws are more noticeable because of it. I’m not going to let it completely off the hook, because, yeah, there were flaws, but there was also the germ of something that could be pretty great, provided they work out the kinks.

Conviction stars the glorious Hayley Atwell, who you probably know from Agent Carter or if you’re a regular reader of this blog, my rants about how great she was on Agent Carter. With that in mind, it’s probably not a surprise that she was far and away the best part of this pilot for me. She made clunky dialogue sound believable, sold emotions that weren’t quite earned, and generally made Hayes watchable, despite the fact that her characterization was wildly inconsistent.

Trust me, I get the anti-heroine. You don’t call Regina Mills your favorite without loving a morally ambiguous character. And I will always, always be happy to see women play the kind of complex, divisive characters that men have been playing for years. The problem is that, instead of feeling like a cohesive character, Hayes’s morality changes from scene to scene and sometimes from line to line. She starts out not caring at all, even though that doesn’t at all jive with her spectacular record as a lawyer. Then she kind of cares but acts like she’s only doing it because she has to. And then, after one conversation with her mother, a conversation they’ve surely had a variation of before given Hayes’s past misdeeds, she completely drops the attitude and commits to the case, but still gives Wallace a vague warning that basically means nothing.

That was another one of my issues with this pilot: there were absolutely no stakes. The five-day window is completely arbitrary; the people they’re trying to free aren’t on death row, if they’re really, really close to overturning a conviction but hit the five-day mark, it’s not like they’re going to just forget it and move onto the next case. I also didn’t buy the ultimatum Hayes’s mother warned her about; if Hayes and Wallace have a past, which they clearly do, then he’s not going to send her to jail, regardless of whether or not she quits. Together, the timeline and the ultimatum make up the premise of Conviction, and if viewers don’t buy that premise, that’s pretty problematic.

That being said, like I mentioned above, the show still has potential. The supporting cast is very strong, with each character getting an intriguing little nugget of backstory in this episode. Merrin Dungey’s Maxine was a particular standout, and I could see her and Hayes developing a brutally honest, Meredith and Cristina-esque friendship. Hayley Atwell and Eddie Cahill have decent chemistry, though I didn’t really get a sense of his character’s personality, aside from being a charming do-gooder with an apparent thing for bad girls.

There’s also the possibility of something interesting with Hayes’s family; she was a little more at ease with them and less intense than she was with the other characters, even though there’s clearly some complicated history with her mom and, judging from the comment about her dad, with him as well.

The shooting style was pretty standard procedural, but the case itself was good, and one nice thing about the show’s premise is that it will allow them to tackle any type of case they want to instead of limiting themselves to murder. I’m also curious to see if they’ll actually fail and choose any cases where the convicted is guilty, because that could add an interesting layer missing from most procedurals.

Honestly, this show’s worth a second look just to see Hayley Atwell play so completely against type, but without some tweaks, that alone won’t be enough to keep me watching.