Summary

• Jake Gyllenhaal shines in the lead role, but the show struggles to balance courtroom intrigue with domestic strife.
• Presumed Innocent misses the mark with an unbalanced focus on family dynamics over the legal corruption core of the novel.
• There are strong performances, yet the series can't decide what it wants to be.

The prospect of David E. Kelley adapting Scott Turow's courtroom thriller novel makes Presumed Innocent an enticing prospect, but sadly it fails to deliver. As with Kelley's recent Netflix show A Man in Full, the AppleTV+ drama draws comparisons with the media circus surrounding former president and convicted felon, Donald Trump. Presumed Innocent centers on a politically motivated trial driven by marital infidelity and impropriety, meaning that the show's June 12 premiere date couldn't be better placed to tap into the zeitgeist.

Presumed Innocent centers on hotshot prosecutor Rusty Sabich (Jake Gyllenhaal, who is also executive producer), whose life is upturned when he's accused of the brutal murder of his mistress, and fellow prosecutor, Carolyn Polhemus (Renate Reinsve). As the showrunner who gave us classic court shows like Ally McBeal and Boston Legal, Kelley might have been the ideal person to adapt Turow's legal thriller into an eight-part miniseries, but that's not the verdict that I came to after viewing.

Presumed Innocent Abandons Courtroom Intrigue For Domestic Strife

Ally McBeal and Boston Legal proved that Kelley is a writer and showrunner who can balance the high drama of a court battle with the mundanity of everyday life. However, Presumed Innocent gets the balance all wrong. That's because its focus leans more toward the aspects of Kelley's other projects, Big Little Lies and The Undoing, shows about privileged families dealing with unspeakable horrors. Turow's novel had elements of that, but it was a more compelling story about corruption in our legal institutions. Kelley's family-focused adaptation therefore misses what made Presumed Innocent such a compulsive read.

Presumed Innocent ties itself in knots trying to give Rusty's wife Barbara (Ruth Negga) a compelling arc of her own.

When Presumed Innocent should be focused on Rusty's lawyers building their defense against the prosecution's circumstantial evidence, it continuously circles back to remind us that his family haven't forgiven him for having an affair. Given that Presumed Innocent was written in 1987, the treatment of women in the novel comes across as dated. So while it's understandable that a modern, progressive adaptation would seek to redress this, the series ties itself in knots trying to give Rusty's wife Barbara (Ruth Negga) a compelling arc of her own.

Presumed Innocent was previously adapted as a 1990 feature film starring Harrison Ford as Rusty Sabich.

By expanding the role of Rusty's family, the show ends up being unfocused and meandering. As an adaptation, Presumed Innocent struggles to decide if it wants to tell the story of how the accusations against Rusty affect his family, or if it wants to focus on the former prosecutor defending his life. There's a compelling mystery at the heart of the story, but it's drowned out by the scenes of domestic strife that Kelley had previously done better in Big Little Lies.

Jake Gyllenhaal Makes It Hard To Presume Innocence

Presumed Innocent is a star vehicle for Jake Gyllenhaal, but his performance lacks the ambiguity the show needs. Gyllenhaal plays Rusty with a degree of barely concealed rage and, on occasion, outright spite and vicious anger. It's therefore hard for an audience to divorce Rusty's darker outbursts from the presumption of innocence. Disappointingly, Presumed Innocent never develops that conflict in a meaningful way, as the scripts rarely give Gyllenhaal a chance to showcase Rusty's duality by highlighting his more sympathetic characteristics.

Only the first seven episodes of Presumed Innocent have been provided for review, which mean we don't know whether Rusty did it or not.

This isn't to say that Gyllenhall gives a bad performance. Rusty's obsession with Carolyn, told through flashbacks and designed to imply he murdered her in a fit of ion, is deeply uncomfortable to watch. A standout scene late in the series shows variations on Rusty and Carolyn's last interaction, and Gyllenhaal subtly changes his tone and physical mannerisms to reflect Rusty's fractured recollections.

Gyllenhaal is also fantastic in the scenes opposite his nemesis, the slimy prosecutor Tommy Molto (Peter Sarsgaard), and their adversarial interactions help to establish the idea that it's petty rivalry, rather than conclusive evidence, driving Rusty's prosecution. Gyllenhaal also has strong chemistry with Bill Camp's Raymond Horgan, Rusty's mentor and defense counsel. Raymond's disappointment in Rusty is palpable, and Gyllenhaal tempers his performance to be more vulnerable in these scenes, hinting that there's at least one person that Rusty feels bad for betraying.

Presumed Innocent Is At Its Best In The Courtroom

It's when this legal drama truly shines

The strongest scenes in Presumed Innocent are those relating to Rusty's trial, depicting the back-and-forth conversations between the defense and prosecution in the lead-up to going before a jury. The political exchanges are compelling to watch thanks to the four central performances of Gyllenhaal, Camp, Sarsgaard, and O-T Fagbenle (The Handsmaid's Tale). Noma Dumezweni is excellent as Judge Lyttle, keeping the petty squabbling of the opposing counsels in check. Negga also gets her best scene in the show when Barbara explains why she won't play along with the doting wife act that the defense counsel has requested.

...despite how gripping the testimonies and cross-examination scenes are, Presumed Innocent can't resist manufacturing more melodramatic flourishes.

It's frustrating, therefore, that Presumed Innocent doesn't place more faith in the courtroom scenes to carry the bulk of the drama. It takes until episode 6 for the trial to kick off in earnest, and despite how gripping the testimonies and cross-examination scenes are, the Apple TV+ series can't resist manufacturing more melodramatic flourishes. The cliffhanger ending in episode 6 is a particularly egregious example of a cheap shock that only serves to undermine what was finally becoming a compelling courtroom drama.

Presumed Innocent is anchored by strong performances across the board, and has some electric trial scenes between its opposing attorneys. But its main problem is that it can't decide whether it wants to be an erotic thriller about obsession and desire, a domestic drama about infidelity and dark secrets, or a courtroom conspiracy drama. The novel and the original Harrison Ford movie managed to knit these elements together in a cohesive way. Unfortunately for Kelley's adaptation of Presumed Innocent, the links between these three elements are circumstantial at best.

Presumed Innocent premieres with episodes 1 & 2 on AppleTV+ on June 12th.