Prisons are filled with innocent people. Just ask the inmates. A few are actually telling the truth. “In Justice” focuses on an energetic array of idealists and opportunists who take up their cause, laboring to right what the justice system has gotten wrong. Hence the word-play title.
Always interesting Kyle MacLachlan heads the cast as David Swain, a super-rich lawyer who underwrites the National Justice Project, which is dedicated to springing the innocent from jail. ABC might be doing viewers, if not the show, an injustice with a confusing rollout strategy. The series’ second episode will air as a sneak preview after “Desperate Housewives” on Sunday. The intended pilot will follow in the regular time period debut on Friday. On some series, episode order is irrelevant. This is not the case with “In Justice,” since Swain has a significant personality and attitude transformation between the two episodes.
In the pilot, Swain is a lecher and boorish publicity hound, whose motivation for bankrolling the NPJ with $5 million of his personal funds seems to be to advance his political ambitions. In the episode that will introduce “In Justice,” Swain is not a louse at all, just a colorful corporate attorney who craves the action of criminal law.
Presumably this is the persona the producers have opted to develop as the series proceeds. But viewers who watch the episodes in the inverted order they will air might wonder what happened to the admirable philanthropist they met five days ago.
Irish actor Jason O’Mara, who has been featured in series on both sides of the Atlantic without breaking through – his most recent in the United States was “The Agency” – gets another big opportunity as Charles Conti, who does most of the heavy lifting for Swain. Conti is a familiar TV sort, a former crack police investigator haunted by a mistake that put away the wrong person and led to a death. To make amends, he turned in his shield and became a do-gooder at the NJP. However, his prior life, which also includes an estranged wife in the DA’s office, is an endless source of insider information. O’Mara handles himself well but lacks the dynamism to stand out against MacLachlan.
The staff Conti supervises also lacks originality. Marisol Nichols plays Sonya Quintano, who was inspired to join the NJP because of a good deed for a family member. Daniel Cosgrove is Jon Lemonick, a career climber with questionable ethics who sees the NJP as the fast track to the top. Constance Zimmer plays a woman named Briana – she goes without a surname in the show and the credits – who is the good cop to Lemonick’s bad cop. All handle their roles competently, but you get the feeling that looks had as much to do with their hiring as acting skills.
“In Justice” puts an inventive spin on in-vogue police procedurals, which concentrate on putting people in jail. But stripped of this twist, it’s just another drama in an oversaturated genre.
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