TV review

Published Monday 13 November 2006 at 13:55 by Harry Venning

“We aren’t interested in who did it,” Professor Jon Ford tells his team of eager- beaver young law students, dedicated to overturning unsafe convictions and miscarriages of justice, “We’re interested in who didn’t do it”.

Which, to borrow a legal phrase and sum up, is the problem with BBC1’s new drama series The Innocence Project. The professor and his photogenic young charges may not care whodunnit, but we viewers still do. In fact, when it comes to legal drama on TV, it’s all we care about.

In fairness, the series does appear aware of this fundamental fault running through its basic premise and makes some attempt to redress it. Episode one, which investigated a dodgy murder conviction based on the testimony of a cell mate, made sure it gave an emphatic nod in the direction of the probable guilty party. However, this still wasn’t enough to banish the impression that we were all following the wrong story. The wrong story told in the wrong way.

The Innocence Project treats its dialogue like a squash ball, to be bounced rapidly around the walls of its implausibly attractive young cast. This is presumably intended to distract from the fact that the script primarily consists of exposition and legal detail. Little room is left in the script for characterisation and the actors have to work within the confines of Seven Dwarves style stereotypes - Specky, Stolid, Spoddy, Serious and Sexy. Actually they’re all quite sexy but one, the maverick with the twinkle in his eye, is clearly intended to be seen as super-sexy.

One final indictment before I lock up The Innocence Project and throw away the key - the theme music is absolutely terrible. The very threat of having to hear this inappropriately uptempo cacophony again would extract a confession out of me to anything.

One thing you can confidently predict about Into the West is that it won’t do the American tourist industry any harm. Produced by Steven Spielberg, this epic tale of the US frontier’s progress to the Pacific never misses an opportunity to present the awe-inspiring majesty of the landscape. Pity about the actors who keep getting in the way of it.

As a drama it’s OK but not particularly thrilling. The problem, I suspect, is that there are no baddies. Every ethnic group represented on screen - white, Native American, African American and Hispanic - is accorded the same amount of respect and dignity. While history recalls massacres aplenty, it remains to be seen if Into The West will have the courage to identify the people responsible for them.

Five’s ambitious, amusing and engaging Perfect Day trilogy ended with The Funeral. Relationships flowered and floundered among the mismatched gang of friends as they headed off to Ireland to say their goodbyes to selfish, devious, smarmy Pete.

Pete met his end driving his sports car into a tree, and given the group’s turbulent personal histories, it’s fair to say that several of their sympathies probably lay with the tree.

DETAILS:

The Innocence Project - BBC1, Thursday, November 9, 8pm

Into the West - BBC2, Saturday, November 4, 9pm

Perfect Day - The Funeral - Five, Wednesday, November 8, 9pm