Thanks to the Winter Olympics, the networks didn't debut many new programs during February sweeps. Now that March is here, it's time for mid-season to rise from its slumber and pelt viewers with a barrage of shows that will be lucky to last until May.
Perhaps the show with the best chance is the latest incarnation of the Law & Order juggernaut, Conviction (NBC, Fridays, 10 p.m.). Creator Dick Wolf has made a slight departure from his franchise's formula, but even without a Law & Order prefix on the title, Conviction features Stephanie March as Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Cabot, a character she played for three seasons on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and the first episode boasts a cameo from Fred Dalton Thompson as District Attorney Arthur Branch.
Conviction drops L&O's traditional split focus to exclusively follow the lawyers, in this case a group of young assistant district attorneys trying cases in Manhattan. The show also breaks from L&O's procedural tone to give time to its characters' personal lives, and the cast is full of young, attractive actors rather than the more seasoned vets that populate the franchise's other shows. The problem is that Wolf and his writers seem unprepared for things like relationships and ongoing subplots, and Conviction has a jarring tonal inconsistency between its meat-and-potatoes court cases (which are standard L&O fare) and its sexed-up interpersonal storylines, which crib from the David E. Kelley playbook without bringing the playful tone he's managed in shows like Boston Legal. It just comes off like someone's square uncle trying to appear hip.
Playwright and filmmaker David Mamet makes his first foray into television with The Unit (CBS, Tuesdays, 9 p.m.), about an elite and top-secret fighting squad within the U.S. military. The premise (based on a book by a Delta Force veteran) is suitably generic for CBS, but the presence of Mamet as creator and executive producer (along with The Shield's Shawn Ryan) promises something more. Whether that's a good or a bad thing largely depends on your opinion of Mamet's hyper-masculine tone and mannered dialogue, both of which show up in abundance in the Mamet-penned pilot and diminish slightly in subsequent episodes handled by other writers.
In the show's world, men are men, there are no more important values than God and country, a woman's place is in the home and things are much better when there's an unquestioned authoritarian presence in charge of it all. Despite the work of such strong actors as Dennis Haysbert, Scott Foley and Robert Patrick, it's hard not to be bothered by this virulently sexist and reactionary show, whose might-makes-right philosophy makes 24 look like happy, fuzzy playtime. It may be accurate that the central fighting force has no women, but the way the show portrays such a sharp divide between the sexes as natural and right is a little disturbing. In the pilot, the wife of the unit's latest recruit is calmly but firmly rebuked in all her independent tendencies, and later episodes show that it's clearly best for her to accept her role as primarily a support system for her husband, and let the military or its proxies make the decisions that are best for her.
Of course, if all you are looking for is military action, The Unit does that well enough, and will probably appeal to the military-loving demographic that watches NCIS, the show's lead-in, or used to tune in to JAG. But anyone who cares about the portrayal of women on TV will want to stay far away from this show.
Over on cable, FX continues to put on daring shows with the new six-part reality series Black. White. (Wednesdays, 10 p.m.). Developed by R.J. Cutler, who also worked on FX's Morgan Spurlock series, 30 Days, and executive-produced by Ice Cube, the show follows two families, one black and one white, as they switch races via extensive makeup and prosthetics. Like 30 Days, Black. White. is more thoughtful and less sensationalistic than your average reality show, even if it does cultivate conflict by putting the two families in a house together for six weeks.
The best thing about the show is that it doesn't offer easy answers for the problems it confronts, and exhibits nearly as many generational differences as it does racial ones. The middle-aged parents in the two families tend to be overly closed-minded (on both sides), but their teenage children have fewer received notions about race and, while they can sometimes come off as naive, they are also more likely to bridge the gaps between races. It's somewhat sad to watch the black father teach his son to look for racism everywhere, and to watch the white father deny that it exists anywhere at all; their children, especially white daughter Rose Wurgel, are rightly more concerned with learning than imposing predetermined views on the experience.
Although the producers find a good variety of activities to immerse the participants in racially charged atmospheres, the show does get repetitive after a while, and might have been better as a single extra-long episode of 30 Days. It also turns a conspicuously blind eye to class, which is something that has a huge effect on the way that people experience race. Both families come from similar upper-middle-class backgrounds, an aspect that is almost never mentioned. Still, there is much fodder for discussion in Black. White., something you can't say for virtually any other reality show out there.