Defending Jacob

This role puts all of Evans’ acting acumen on full display. Sensitive, thoughtful, yet oddly contradictory, Evans says just as much with Andy’s subtle facial movements than he does with any line of dialogue. It’s a masterful performance.

An addictive murder mystery with terrific performances, some chilling twists and turns — and a shocking finale that veers close to flying off the rails but is kinda great given everything that has already transpired.

It’s a well-done drama that will keep you guessing and entertained and thinking about it even when you’re not watching it.

“Defending Jacob” is gripping enough in its own way, despite some of the familiar moves, and the acting is consistently fine.

“Defending Jacob” is fairly straightforward. It has a murder. It has a suspect. It has a trial. And then it starts sprinkling in reasonable doubt. If there’s a greater lesson to be learned, we missed it. ... Thanks to a great score and lingering cinematography, “Defending Jacob” is good. It just seems supersized to justify a film star showing up on television.

It is thanks to its narrow, altogether gripping—if also frequently suffocating—clinical focus on the inner lives of its subjects that we come to know the Barber family of Massachusetts. ... The portrayal of this devoted couple is far from convincing. It’s a peculiarly weak aspect of this otherwise strong production.

Evans and Dockery are fantastic. ... But the pacing takes away any urgency that is inherent in the storyline. The shocking reveals are way too drawn out. The result is a murder mystery you can put down.

No small thanks to that knockout ensemble, Defending Jacob [is] absorbing for much of its run, though the compelling drama tends to come in fits, surrounded by lulls, side-tangents, and red herrings that too often seem to lead nowhere. In part, it’s obvious that’s because the material simply doesn’t fill an eight-episode run, at least not as it was adapted.

Approached as a crime drama, Defending Jacob might seem a little slow and underbaked, but as an ensemble character piece it hits the mark.

It’s an ambitious attempt to combine a mystery with a faulty-parenting drama. ... It all goes on too long, though. Part of the problem is repetition. ... The series has a consistent tone of somber deliberation that might just be Tyldum’s style but plays as a way to hold together a story that’s been stretched too far. “Defending Jacob” has great ingredients, but the portion size is off.

Chris Evans might not have a shield in Defending Jacob, but the eight-part miniseries -- based on a bestselling novel -- is all about shielding his son. Well cast and twisty, it's an earnest if mostly undistinguished effort, one that relies heavily on the one-time Avenger's star power in serving its mission to bring viewers to Apple TV+.

The conventions are so familiar that it's hard to find a single story beat or plot twist or emotional swing in Defending Jacob that doesn't feel utterly stale, elongated to a running time of eight hours not so much for added nuance, but mostly because the kind of two-hour film Defending Jacob would have been. ... That leaves Defending Jacob with a superb cast and solid production values and little to add to the conversation.

The eight-part limited series does a good job of making us feel the parents’ uncertainty about whether Jacob is innocent or guilty. But that suspense is made to carry too much of the load for the relaxed pace of the show, which takes its own sweet time drawing us in.

The worst thing about Apple TV+'s new limited series Defending Jacob is that it feels like every other crime series we've seen before. ... It is not a terrible show, but without adding anything new to the genre — the fact the main suspect is a teen is as close as it gets — it's also hard to classify it as good.

The story never lingers long enough at home for the family drama to really take hold. ... The result is a story that feels both overstuffed and underdeveloped. Like its namesake, Defending Jacob is brought down just as it’s taking off.

“Defending Jacob” saves up enough drama for the final two episodes to make it feel like a substantive event has taken place — enough that you’ll beg to spoil the ending for your friends just to recap the insanity out loud — but when you break it down into parts, there’s not much there.

This is perhaps the rare mini-series that should have been a movie, rather than the other way around. All the good is packed in at the end, and it takes seven lugubrious hours to get there.

Defending Jacob is not bad so much as the result of what happens when you try to reverse-engineer a bestseller into a conversation-starter, and prestige-TV it to death.

“Defending Jacob” should be a show about the impact of a murder investigation on parents who thought their lives were totally normal, but by keeping us in the dark, it feels more like a game, a cheap Lifetime mystery ... only four times as long.

“Defending Jacob” is a measured and duplicative story that feels like a collection of clips from other well-produced, but ultimately forgettable, crime narratives.

Sluggish and deeply dour miniseries. ... The case for watching “Defending Jacob” is thin indeed, even at this peculiar cultural moment when viewers are willing and able to watch just about anything. Dockery overcomes creator-writer Mark Bomback’s clunksome scripts, once more proving that she has much to offer beyond “Downton,” while Evans’s performance is as weak and uninspired as can be — rivaled in its flatness only by Martell’s empty take on a troubled teen.