When you have the writer of Shameless and State of Play and the producer of Cracker and Red Dwarf launching a new production company, the expectations for their first drama series are high.
Cue the first showing of The Innocence Project, the first drama series from Tightrope the indie founded by Paul Abbott and producer Hilary Bevan Jones.
The Innocence Project is certainly a neat idea, a "gang show" with a young and good looking cast playing trainee lawyers committed to overturning miscarriages of justice under the suave tutelage of their professor, played by the dashing Lloyd Owen. I even noticed a Morse-style vinyl record player behind the Prof's desk, such is his fatherly cool. As for the lawyers, there's the flash rich one, the idealistic one, the geeky one, the chatty one and the outsider (a cop on sabbatical played by the excellent Stephen Graham). It's like Press Gang only grown up mixed with a bit of Hustle and, though I hate to say it, uncomfortable smatterings of Scooby Doo.
Also, it's a cold case drama but the case in the first episode was so cold it seemed positively arctic. The lawyers build up their case, and thereby the dramatic tension, through various yellowing legal documents which sporadically come to light. A dodgy confession and fingerprints on a stile (as in the thing you climb over in a field) are among many clues but we don't even see the stile in question or get a visual sense of the crime with the help of a single reconstruction. It's a strange mistake to have made.
The gang all do their bit at work, at Pizza Express or at young happening house parties, but the occasional confusion is also not helped by sometimes brutal insertions of case law and CPS jargon into the banter. Episode one's writer Oliver Brown trained as a lawyer and it shows - but not always in a good way.
What keeps this going is the snappy acting and breezy youthfulness of the ensemble. The wise cracks are OK, though not all of these are as wise or indeed as cracking as they could be. But it is certainly a good premise, it may bring a younger audience to BBC1 and could even give ITV1's The Bill a run for its money (the first of eight parts starts next month on Thursdays at 8pm). But it needs to pick up.
