Proven Innocent

Kartheiser, who’s taking what he can get these days, has grown a beard for the role of the rather zany Bodie. The role is somewhat fleshed out in Episode 4, but it’s still not much to speak of. Lefevre, who co-starred in CBS’ summertime Under the Dome series, has some crackle as the head protagonist in Presumed Innocent. ... Presumed Innocent also can be transparently heavy-handed in its political leanings.

Proven Innocent looks to be a middling, mildly involving and sensationalistic crime anthology, with self-contained, single-episode plots about seeking justice for the wrongfully accused and the wrongfully convicted, along with an ongoing mystery about a murder more than a decade earlier. The tabloid-friendly, relatively complex old case is more compelling than the all-too-conveniently-resolved one-off plots.

Proven Innocent’s clumsy earnestness, undercut by a baffling insensitivity, is not the answer to standing out from the “Law & Orders” of TV and could turn off viewers from the very things it’s espousing.

So many flashbacks for a murder mystery that is not remotely compelling.

Sure, there are moments of winning courtroom drama — mostly of sub-“The Good Wife” variety — but the show packs in a lot more. Early in Friday’s pilot, that pace works, but, eventually, it bogs down after the show piles one too many bits of ridiculousness on top of the last.

Each Proven Innocent episode has a one-off case of injustice to handle and in the two episodes I've watched, both procedural cases are handled without any notable ingenuity. That's paired with the incrementally inching case of who actually killed Madeline and Levi's friend, a mystery that is interjected with some style by pilot director Patricia Riggen, though it lacks for sufficient intrigue to be parsed out in this way.

The issues at play in FOX’s Proven Innocent demand a level of nuance that the writing team behind this show are either uninterested in providing or incapable of doing so.

Grammer’s performance is his most puffily villainous yet, making Sideshow Bob of “The Simpsons” look complex and soft-spoken. ... Only Lefevre really stands out, not entirely positively. Her delivery of lines is unusual and offbeat, sometimes in ways that improve the script, and sometimes in ways that make the show, and Madeline, a bit challenging to spend time with.