2016-2017, 13 episodes. Hayes Morrison, daughter of an ex-president
and living with a party-girl reputation, runs a unit that reviews old
cases.
So basically this is a criminal investigation show, effectively a
police procedural, except that the crimes happened years ago, the
forensic science has mostly already been done, and the person
convicted probably didn't do it. I probably wouldn't have given this a
look had it not been for Hayley Atwell in the lead (and Shawn Ashmore
as the guy who would have got the job and ends up working under
her).
But lots of uninspired cop shows do well, so why did this one feel
like a dead show walking right from episode one? I think that people
who watch a cop show want to think cops in general mostly get it
right, and every episode here is about how they got it wrong, at least
potentially. Some of the victims turn out to be guilty of something
else, but even that's still a police error. So people may have been
predisposed to dislike it even before the often-clumsy writing and
heavy-handed character development became apparent. (Every character
in the main cast has a Past, and Problems which will be worked out in
thirty-second chunks in between the cases of the week.)
There's always a short deadline, a single-digit number of days, and
it's never explained why this is the case (only one of the episodes
actually deals with a pending execution). Once one notices this, it
tends to feel very artificial – as if the unit didn't have enough
problems already!
Even Hayley Atwell's performance is patchy. Sometimes she's on fire
and dominates the screen; sometimes she just presides over case
meetings and lets everyone else do the work, and whether she was told
to tone down the charisma or simply didn't bring it to what was in
those episodes effectively a bit part, the end result is inconsistent.
The show wasn't renewed, and indeed it was effectively cancelled after
five episodes had aired. I can't say it was a great loss, but it had a
few good moments, and I'm still surprised this got so much early
negativity when something really terrible and even more predictable
(like Lethal Weapon or The Exorcist) didn't.
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