The Great Rewatch: CONVICTION - The Forgotten "Law & Order" Spin-Off

It likely goes without saying that anyone who’s watched more than a few hours of television since the early 1990s can’t help but be familiar with the NBC procedural Law & Order, and since success on the small screen inevitably leads to spin-offs, you’re likely also familiar with Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. In turn, current fans of that series will no doubt also know about Law & Order: Organized Crime, a.k.a. the series that brought everyone’s favorite zaddy, Christopher Meloni, back to the prime-time schedule as Det. Elliott Stabler. Of course, these three series are currently airing back back on the NBC Thursday night lineup, but looking back, we’ve also seen Law & Order: Criminal Intent, the short-lived Law & Order: Los Angeles, and the even shorter-lived Law & Order: Trial by Jury.

But do you recall the least Law & Order-y spinoff of all?

Yes, obviously, one reason that Conviction might reasonably be called less than Law & Order-y is that it doesn’t actually include the words “Law” or “Order” in its title. More than that, however, is the simple fact that it doesn’t even remotely feel like Law & Order…and that’s even with a key character from the SVU-niverse in its cast.

Longtime viewers of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit will remember A.D.A. Alexandra Cabot, played by Stephanie March, and if you do, then you’ll also remember how complicated things got with Alex over the years. After three seasons, she was killed in a car bombing…except she really wasn’t, although every character on the show thought she was dead barring the aforementioned Elliot Stabler and series stalwart Olivia Benson. Placed in the Witness Protection Program, Alex remained seemingly dead until the following season, when she re-emerged in order to testify against her “murderer,” after which she ostensibly went back into the Witness Protection Program with a new identity. A little over a year later, however, Conviction made its debut, and—lo and behold!—there was Alex, out of the WPP, back in NYC, and serving as supervisor to a group of new ADAs.

On the team: Jim Steele (Anson Mount), Brian Peluso (Eric Balfour), Billy Desmond (J. August Richards), Jessica Rossi (Milena Govich), Christina Finn (Julianna Nicholson), and Nick Potter (Jordan Bridges).

How and why Alex made her way back to NYC is something that was never revealed during the course of Conviction’s 13-episode run, although it’s been suggested that it would’ve been discussed if the show had gotten picked up for a second season. It was eventually explained, however, so if you’re truly interested, you can find out by watching “Lead,” an episode from season 10 of SVU. Was this some reward to the viewers of Conviction who had been waiting patiently for an explanation?

Uh, yeah, I’m going to go out on a limb and say “no,” since I don’t think any aspect of this series has ever been acknowledged by any other Law & Order series. In fact, by the time “Lead” aired, it was as if Conviction never happened. With Alex, it was ignored to the point where, when she shows up at a crime scene, both Benson and Stabler look as if they’ve seen a ghost, after which they promptly call her out for having been out of witness protection for three years without ever getting back in touch. Imagine how pissed they would’ve been if they’d found out she was actually back in the city and working as a Bureau Chief A.D.A.!

And that wasn’t even the first time the series was ignored: only a few months after its cancellation, Milena Govich joined the cast of Law & Order, not as her Conviction character, A.D.A. Jessica Rossi, but as a brand new character, Det. Nina Cassady. (She spent a season teamed with Jesse L. Martin as Det. Ed Green.) Same deal with Julianne Nicholson, who—in the wake of Conviction’s cancellation—joined Law & Order: Criminal Intent not as A.D.A. Christina Finn but, rather, as Det. Megan Wheeler. Sure, it was a nice way to keep these two actresses gainfully employed, and they were both great in their new gigs, but their rapid-fire shifts from series regulars on one series to series regulars on other series within the same franchise only a few months later… I mean, it’s weird, right?

Then again, as noted, Conviction itself was weird, at least in terms of its position in the Law & Order universe, a fact which creator / executive producer didn’t hesitate to acknowledge when it debuted.

"Since Conviction will be a 'charactercedural,' we will be dealing extensively with characters' back stories and personal lives," Wolf said in December 2005. "I am delighted with the extraordinary cast we have assembled, which will give the show depth and emotional intensity."

As Robert Lloyd wrote of the show in his March 2006 review:

“[Conviction] is not the ultimately tidy universe of the original L&O; Whereas nearly every episode of Law & Order was to see justice done and the world set straight, the titular order restored -- its very predictability on this account is part of what makes it so endlessly easy to watch and makes the earliest episodes of a piece with the latest -- Conviction as a serial drama is necessarily about a world out of balance, where happiness is just a transient state between crises.”

Almost immediately upon its cancellation, Conviction: The Complete Series was released on DVD, at which point I reviewed it for Bullz-Eye.com, doling our four stars and calling it “at least as good as any other legal-based series on the air, a stylistic mix between the plots of Boston Legal and the camaraderie between colleagues that’s found on Grey’s Anatomy.” You can check out the review in its entirety by clicking right here, but looking back on it at this precise moment, after having already written the preceding paragraphs of this piece, I had to laugh when I read this:

“It’d sure be nice if some of these characters turned up one or more of the Law and Order series at some point in the future.”

Yeah, that sure would’ve been nice…

Re-watching the series in 2022, I found myself enjoying it as much now as I did then, although I admit that I enjoyed it on a different level this time around, enjoying the chance to see Anson Mount and Julianne Nicholson now that I’m much more familiar with their work. Similarly, I was able to enjoy J. August Richards’ performance on the show without memories of his work as an attorney for Wolfram & Hart being quite so prominent in my mind. But one thing’s for sure about this show: it 100% does not feel like it’s part of the Law & Order universe. From that standpoint, I can appreciate why they felt like it was so easy to treat it like a failed experiment and just move on as it if had never happened, but it’s still disappointing that it also resulted in the dismissal of every single character that they took the time to create.

If you want to check out Conviction, I regret to inform you that it’s not streaming anywhere at the moment, but if you’re curious enough to actually pick up a copy, it won’t cost you much to do so: the complete-series DVD set is currently available on Amazon for less than $4.00. I