Conviction 2004 TV Series

Conviction (2004 TV series)



The series is centred on the Fairburn family, all of whom live in an edgy Lancashire town with a growing tendency towards vigilante justice. All three of the Fairburn siblings are involved with law enforcement: brothers Chrissie (William Ash) and Ray (Nicholas Gleaves) are police officers, while their sister Beth (Zoe Henry) works as a lawyer. Beth, Chrissie and Ray's widowed father Lenny (David Warner) is a retired police officer who berates the political correctness of his children's modern methods: he himself is fighting a losing battle with Alzheimer's disease and struggling to come to terms with the fact that he can no longer be the strong and authoritative head of the family.

Ray and Chrissie work as officers in a five-person Criminal Investigation Department team. The other members are the solitary but insightful Robert (Reece Dinsdale); Lucy (Laura Fraser), the newest recruit, with a need to prove herself; and the volatile family man Joe (Ian Puleston-Davies), an 'old school' officer with a barely contained temper and a tendency to both bully Chrissie and clash with the "by-the-book" Ray.

The murder of a 12-year-old girl adds to existing tensions and pushes an already angry community towards action and revenge. In this atmosphere, the various policemen involved in the murder investigation begin to take increasingly dangerous steps towards concluding the investigation. The situation becomes even more complicated when Beth becomes the defence lawyer for the principal suspect, Jason Buliegh (Jason Watkins). As the distinction between right and wrong becomes fatally blurred, two of the officers take things a step too far.