Presumed Innocent Review

Before I embarked on my television critic career, I was a lawyer. Which means I have a heck of a hard time watching legal shows without finding myself yelling at the screen as they butcher the practice of law in order to make it seem suspenseful or at all interesting (because, in reality, being a lawyer is a lot of sitting around, writing, and trying not to pull your hair out – not standing in court, approaching the witness, and delivering stirring speeches to win over the jury – something only Better Call Saul really managed to capture). So, I tend to avoid legal shows on principle, hoping to keep my blood pressure low. But, when the screeners for Presumed Innocent – the limited series based on the Scott Turrow novel that was turned into a film of the same name starring Harrison Ford in 1990 – arrived, I figured, what the hell? Let’s give it a shot. After all, I wanted to have some idea why AppleTV+, David E. Kelley (who is no stranger to the television legal drama game), and star Jake Gyllenhaal thought this was the story that needed to be brought back to the masses.

If you’re unfamiliar with the source material, the basic plot of the story remains unchanged in this incarnation. Gyllenhaal plays Rusty Sabich (the role played by Ford in the film), an attorney with the Chicago District Attorney’s Office who appears to be happily married to his college sweetheart Barbara (Ruth Negga, given just enough to do to justify having her in the series) with two teenaged kids. Of course, all is not as it seems, and Rusty has been carrying on an affair with his colleague, Carolyn Polhemus (Renate Reinsve, relegated to simply being the other woman and given almost no agency in the story). Barbara knows, Rusty is in therapy for the entire situation, but for some reason, he can’t seem to give up Carolyn. Which becomes a major issue for everyone in his life when Carolyn is found brutally raped and murdered in her home. Naturally, Rusty’s affair – and his expressed desire to continue seeing Carolyn even after she ends things – make him the top suspect. It also doesn’t help that his closest ally at the DA’s Office – the DA himself, Raymond Horgan (Bill Camp, doing great work in a limited capacity) – loses his election campaign and the new DA, Nico Della Guardia (O-T Fagbenle, in a strange performance with an even stranger attempt at some version of an American accent), and his buddy, Tommy Molto (Peter Sarsgaard, slimy as hell in a role that could use some more heft to it), clearly have it out for him.*

*In the original story, Rusty hires a flashy defense attorney – famously played by the late Raul Julia in the film version. That character has been excised from the story in this version, which makes the characters and the plot all the more intertwined in a strangely incestuous way through their connections to the DA’s Office – without the story delving into how the office and its culture (and its employees) are responsible for so much of the story itself. And, unlike in the original version, Carolyn doesn’t appear to be trying to sleep her way to the top of the legal food chain either, which makes keeping so much of the story centered around the DA’s Office all the more strange without getting into more of the office politics at play that led to the schism between Molto, Della Guardia, Rusty and Horgan (besides the election itself). If you want to keep your major players all attached to a single workplace, you should use the politics of that location as another character or at least a key element of the story. That’s not the case here, which is unfortunate.

Now, that’s a lot of exposition, and that really only covers the first two episodes of the series. And you might be thinking, “Wow. If that’s only the first couple of episodes, this should be a series chock full of plot and twists and turns!” Well, you would be wrong, my friend. If you’ve read the novel or seen the film, you know that there is a lot of plot to churn through. We have to have a couple of red herrings presented as alternative suspects, we need to continue teasing out whether or not Rusty is the killer, and we need to get through the trial itself, complete with some sensational moments (both in the “Wow, that was a really well-done and exciting cross-examination” and in the “That’s absolutely nuts and I can’t believe that would really happen” variety). And we do. The series shows us that pretty much everyone except Raymond Horgan and Rusty believe him to be guilty – although we don’t really get to see deep enough into Barbara’s own frame of mind once the trial is underway to deduce her own thoughts. She gets a bit of an arc of her own, but despite spending time with her on her own away from Rusty, we never get a real look into what she thinks about Rusty, save for her publicly supporting him at the trials and taking him to task for his actions with Carolyn at home. But so much of the series – from the writing to a number of the key performances – feel soulless (Fagbenle, Sarsgaard, and Reinsve are the clearest victims of the poor writing, as their characters are one-note and wholly underdeveloped), like everyone is just going through the motions. And really, when you’re telling a story that has been told twice before – with a huge amount of success – it’s hard to muster up much excitement to see the story a third time.*

It’s here that I should note that AppleTV+ only provided critics with seven of the eight episodes of the series. Which means that none of us know if the series maintains the same ending as the novel and the film. Knowing who the killer was in the original versions of the story, it’s absolutely possible that the series is setting up that same reveal here. However, it’s also completely possible that the series will swerve and provide us with a completely new killer (I can think of two distinct options off the top of my head). This also makes it incredibly hard for me to come up with a complete review for you all, as I have no idea if the series sticks the landing in the end and provides us with a killer who makes sense in terms of what the series has presented us with – which means I’m going to be more critical than I might have otherwise been of the story up until the finale.

For all of the plot contained within the story, Presumed Innocent hinges on the portrayal of Rusty. In the original film version, Harrison Ford opted to play the character as an enigma – at any given moment in the film you could see him as a killer or as an innocent victim. Gyllenhaal takes a different tactic when presenting his take on Rusty. His version is a man full of righteous anger and resentment. He was admittedly obsessed with Carolyn and fully willing to destroy his life to have her. He has an explosive temper – we see it on display at multiple points throughout the series. And he’s incredibly angry at both Barbara and Carolyn for not allowing him to have what he wants – a wife who loves and respects him, his children, and his mistress. This is not a good guy. In fact, this is the kind of guy who, if he’s indeed guilty, I wouldn’t feel even an iota of sadness at the thought of him spending the rest of his life in prison. The series even has him imagine, time and again, that he’s the person killing Carolyn – are they flashbacks or the creation of a mind broken and messed up by what has befallen him? We won’t know until the story comes to a close. But it’s an intriguing way to approach what would traditionally be seen as our sympathetic hero.

By making it so Rusty is an unreliable leading character – and by making us question his innocence throughout the story in such clear ways – it makes it harder for us to latch onto the various alternative killers who are offered to us. Sure, a couple are red herrings who are tossed away pretty quickly. But Rusty seems like such a viable possibility, so why devote time and energy looking at other potential killers. Especially when the show crosses one of its big options off the list right near the end of the story. If not for years of conditioning that it’s never the leading man, I would simply assume that Rusty did it and had some sort of blackout that prevented him from recalling the event. But, even with Rusty being a jerk you don’t necessarily want to root for, Gyllenhaal does a good job showing us a man who doesn’t believe he deserves the hand he’s been dealt, even after he realized he only has himself to blame for so much of what he has endured.

So, after all of that, is this latest version of Presumed Innocent worth eight hours of your time? Based on what I’ve seen, probably not, unless you’re a superfan of the story itself. The writing is pedestrian at best – and it certainly doesn’t need eight episodes to layout the story, especially when it doesn’t take that additional time to flesh out any of our major characters including Carolyn herself (who received a much more complex story arc in the original material – here, none of that backstory is at all present). The performances fall into archetypes – Tommy Molto is the scummy prosecutor with an axe to grind, Nico Della Guardia is a power hunger politically minded jerk, Rusty is the angry, put-upon victim – and don’t offer the stacked cast much to do outside of feeding those archetypes. This is an interesting story and it was a huge hit 35 years ago for a reason. Here, now, there’s not much new to be said and no clear reason why we needed this updated version when it was told perfectly well all the way back in 1990. But, who knows, maybe that final episode will turn things on its head and make this a story worth re-examining. Until then, I’m marking this one as a skip.

Presumed Innocent premieres on June 12 on AppleTV+. Seven of the series’ eight episodes were provided for review.