Trials of young prosecutors

The ads for “Conviction,” which premieres tonight on NBC, have taken pains to point out that the average age of an assistant district attorney (or perhaps a New York assistant district attorney, I don’t recall specifically) is 28, which I read as a preemptive strike against complaints that here again is a drama top-loaded with improbably young, good-looking kids. Well, I will grant them the “young,” but as to the universal beauty of lawyers, I daresay they may have stretched the truth. Conveniently, they’re all single.

That this is a show aimed at least in part at the Whatever Letter Generation This Is Now That Represents the 18-34 Demographic is demonstrated by the fact that NBC has already made the pilot available on iTunes, for pod-watching, in order to create some advance hubbub.

Dick “Law & Order” Wolf is the man behind the curtain here; he calls the show a “charactercedural,” an unhappy neologism that he should pack away forthwith, especially given how little of the “cedural” there is about it. Built from multiple story lines and with its alternation of personal business and courtroom scenes, “Conviction” is, structurally speaking, “Ally McBeal” or “Boston Legal,” but with cheap office furniture, an inverse ratio of comedy to drama, and a lot of location shooting.

Location, location, location -- it’s one of the secrets of Wolf’s success. The first time the show comes fully alive is with a wintry street scene, a composition in whites and grays, that unleashes the energy of the authentic street and ties “Conviction,” like its Wolfean predecessors, to the great New York cop films of the ‘70s and early ‘80s, “The French Connection” and “Serpico” and “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,” and on and on.

At heart, it’s a soap opera, just another tale of being young and sexy and gainfully employed in The City That Barely Sleeps (and sometimes sleeps together, and sometimes oversleeps). The educational and philosophical and headline-ripping impulses that animate much of the “L&O;” franchise are downplayed here in favor of personal business: What matters not is how the lawyers construct their cases so much as how the cases deconstruct the lawyers. They jockey for position, let personal agendas sometimes pervert their concern for justice, wonder why they sometimes have to help people not worth helping or hurt people who don’t really deserve it.

After work they hang out together in bars and go dancing -- presumably not to the music of Vonda Shepard. In the morning, there are hangovers.

It 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. (The writers use some narrative shock tactics, not entirely original or new to television, but still shocking.)

As with most things Wolf, it is superbly cast, almost too well -- each of the regulars seems the inarguable quintessence of his or her character. There is the rich kid (Jordan Bridges, son of Beau) jumping from a cushy corporate firm in order to get to “try cases,” the sexy rake living too close to the edge (Eric Balfour) but sweet deep down, the unsure ingenue (Julianne Nicholson), the ambitious hotshot (J. August Richards), the man-eater (Milena Govich) masking her pain by insisting on her freedom, the hard-nosed bureau chief (Stephanie March, importing the character she played on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit”) and the prickly but ultimately sensitive deputy D.A. (Anson Mount).

But every small role is well cast too -- the judges, the defendants, the policemen. They help create a lively world that’s more believable than it sometimes deserves to be, and it is almost always engaging.

*

‘Conviction’

Where: NBC

When: 10 to 11 tonight

Ratings: TV-14-SL (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14, with advisories for sex and coarse language)