‘Presumed Innocent’ Review: David E. Kelley Should Be Stopped

AAn attractive prosecutor is murdered in a sinister manner. The prosecutor assigns his trusted deputy, a charismatic and respected family man, to the case. What he doesn’t know is that the aforementioned lawyer had an affair with the deceased. Then the case comes to light and the golden boy is tried for murder. He did that? We won’t know until the end.

This is the now familiar plot of Presumed innocent, the best-selling 1987 debut novel by Scott Turow, who would become one of the biggest names in the legal thriller genre. An all-star film adaptation was released in 1990, directed by All the President’s Men It is The parallax view author Alan J. Pakula and stars Harrison Ford as the defendant, Rusty Sabich. The film was a critical and public success. Although its gender politics have aged poorly, it remains a wonderfully twisty, well-made courtroom drama with touches of erotic suspense.

The emergence, decades later, of a slow series of eight episodes Presumed innocent the series would be baffling if Hollywood weren’t so hungry for adaptations and remakes, and particularly if the show weren’t directed by David E. Kelley, television’s increasingly prolific — and increasingly mediocre — creator of such projects. Twenty-seven years after capturing the zeitgeist of the late 90s with Ally McBealseven years after having achieved his prestige on TV with Big little liesand about six weeks after releasing a disastrous Netflix adaptation of the Tom Wolfe film A complete man, it is clear that he no longer deserves his reputation as a maverick. Although a new Kelley show had already been a cause for anticipation, in 2024 the more appropriate response is dread.

Kelley has a formula these days, and Presumed innocent, premiering June 12 on Apple TV+, sticks true to it. Like most of Kelley’s projects, since the beginning of his career as a writer for Los Angeles Law through Boston Law in her daughters and her recent book adaptation that became a film Lincoln’s lawyer, takes place mainly in a courtroom. As Lies, A man, Nine Perfect Strangers, The UndoIt is Anatomy of a scandal, was adapted from a novel and features an A-list cast. Jake Gyllenhaal dishonors Ford with a surprisingly dull performance as Rusty; Ruth Negga makes the best of the underwritten role of his mysteriously loyal wife, Barbara; and Peter Sarsgaard has fun playing Rusty’s scheming nemesis, Tommy Molto. (Stalwart actor Bill Camp, as the embattled prosecutor, is the standout of the cast.) As in Kelley’s favorite subgenre, the oblivious rich wife show (see, especially: The Undo, Anatomy) the main male character is a charming enigma for everyone, including not only his wife, but also the viewer.

These habits wouldn’t be so frustrating if performing the typical post-Lies Kelley’s show didn’t seem so half-hearted. Pacing is a perennial problem. While A man crushed a 742-page novel into six simplistic episodes, Presumed innocent extends a story that worked perfectly as a two-hour film to three times that length, rendering it almost inert. Aside from some shaky handheld camerawork and a drab blue and beige palette, the series has no real visual style. When it’s not riddled with clichés (“She woke up something inside me. Something I thought was dead”), the dialogue can sound comically robotic, like preliminary notes that Kelley (who wrote or co-wrote nearly every episode) never worried about refining it into a script. Confessing to a flirtation with a girlfriend, Barbara is incredulous when she hears the woman encourage her to have an affair: “Are you seriously suggesting that I have some extramarital revenge sex with a bartender I just met?”

The project may not be entirely cynical on the part of Kelley and his main collaborator on Presumed innocent, mega-producer JJ Abrams. If there’s one good reason to reimagine this story, it’s to address the misogyny implicit in the book and film, which, like so many erotic thrillers from the 1980s and 1990s, portray female characters as unhinged leeches willing to do anything in the name of crime. of love or ambition. But this version features women in crucial behind-the-scenes roles; Its executive producers include writer Miki Johnson and director Anne Sewitsky. Barbara and murder victim, Carolyn (The worst person in the world escape Renate Reinsve), seem nicer, but also a little boring. Kelley also added roles for women outside of the love triangle. And while I wasn’t able to screen the ending, it seems likely that the series is heading towards a slightly different fate than its predecessors.

Unfortunately, as the second season of Lies, The Undo, Anatomyand the rapid deterioration of Kelley’s initially promising ABC crime drama Big sky have proven, it takes more than vague feminist intentions to put on a great show. Neither big stars, best-selling source materials, nor court intrigues are enough to overcome hackneyed writing. Good TV requires purpose, style, and attention to detail—all things that David E. Kelley now seems short on to offer.