Say you’re on trial for the brutal murder of a prosecutor who happened to be your co-worker, with whom you were engaged in a stormy affair, and, uh-oh, was pregnant with your child at the time of her death.
Say you were demonstrably obsessed with the victim, and eyewitness accounts and DNA evidence put you at the scene of the crime the night she was murdered. Say this is all revealed during a national media circus while you’re trying to keep your own family intact.
Say the person prosecuting you is your nemesis in the District Attorney’s office (where you happen to be a prosecutor yourself) and that your own lawyer, also a former colleague, has a cardiac emergency during opening arguments in the trial, where you will likely be called to testify.
Take my layperson advice with all the obvious grains of salt, but given all those factors, I would think it is probably NOT a good strategy to assert the constitutional right to defend yourself in court. Just a suggestion.
But a couple of episodes into “Presumed Innocent,” the hit limited series that concluded this week on Apple TV+, it becomes obvious that this is exactly what will happen in the trial of Rusty Sabich (Jake Gyllenhaal), and why not? Because it’s not realistic? Don’t be silly.
Every TV and movie courtroom drama requires the suspension of disbelief. The legal system is designed not to be exciting, so using it as a setting for dramatic storytelling requires artful embellishment. But even by the standards of the genre, “Presumed Innocent” is notably untethered to plausibility or logic.
The series, based on the bestselling 1980s Scott Turrow novel of the same name, uses a few bullet points about American courts to construct an outlandish thriller whose tenuous relationship to reality is a big part of the fun.
An inexplicably swole Gyllenhaal appears in the Harrison Ford role from the 1990 film adapted from the same source. An assistant DA in Chicago, he is assigned to investigate the murder of a fellow prosecutor, Carolyn (Renate Reinsve), but neglects to disclose his minor conflict of interest — their affair and all the circumstantial evidence linking him to her killing.
Whoops.
As these details emerge, Rusty soon becomes the prime suspect of a vindictive rival prosecutor, Tommy (a magnificently wormy Peter Sarsgaard), and an ambitious new DA, Nico (an even wormier O-T Fagbenle), who both are his colleagues in an H.R. nightmare of an office whose holiday party promises to be a blast this year.
The economics of streaming require properties to be mined for as much content as possible, so a novel that was adapted into a perfectly serviceable two-hour movie naturally sags when stretched to fill seven hours of prestige-y television.
This gives “Presumed Innocent,” helmed by crime-TV czar David E. Kelley, time for three storylines, not all of them equally absorbing. There is a domestic drama, in which Rusty attempts to reconcile with his inexplicably loyal wife Barbara (Ruth Negga) and traumatized children.
There is a parallel murder investigation in which Rusty, desperate to create reasonable doubt, searches frantically for a suspect other than himself, producing a typical whodunnit roster of hypothetical killers and red herrings. (I’m writing this before the final episode reveals What Really Happened, but it’s been a fun Reddit game for viewers not already familiar with the book and movie.)
And there is the courtroom setting, which aside from a drinking game’s worth of self-aware story tropes, nearly dispenses with its cliffhangers and twists long enough to make a point about the American criminal justice system.
As a prosecutor, Rusty has sent to jail countless guilty people and surely some who were innocent but lacked the resources for a robust defense. Here, he is on the less-fortunate side of a process in which the truth is incidental to results that would juice conviction rates for political expediency.
The whole experience would probably make him better at his job if he didn’t have bigger fish to fry.
But another layer below the steamy surface is an idealism hinted at in the title, that everybody, no matter how corrupt or unlikable — and Rusty is certainly those things — is entitled to the same presumption of innocence. The show’s most provocative idea turns out to be its least sexy.