Presumed Innocent

Apple TV+’s Presumed Innocent is a sleek and riveting legal thriller, thanks to great performances and writer David E. Kelley’s courtroom expertise.

Despite not always being a compelling mystery, “Presumed Innocent” makes up for it in spades with a fantastic ensemble and a captivating feud between two egotistical lawyers. This is David E. Kelley working in the register he excels at: a legal thriller with just enough interpersonal relationship drama and a touch of mystery.

Entirely watchable, “Presumed Innocent” is one of the best legal thrillers to arrive on television in years.

Apple TV+'s Presumed Innocent is a masterclass in how to take the source material and honor it while also doing something completely new with a familiar story. Its nuanced approach to justice, lust, power, ethics, and pride makes it one of the standout television shows of the year.

Should be the television talk of the summer, which is fitting considering Turow’s novel has long been an ideal beach read.

You’ll get sucked in from the start, and will continually waffle over Rusty’s innocence and the list of potential suspects. “Presumed Innocent” makes a strong case that Kelley needs to stick to making legal thrillers. It’s what he excels at.

As he proved with A Man in Full, Kelley isn’t afraid to do major reconstructive surgery on a novel’s ending, so it’s possible that Turow's past is not his prologue. No matter how it ends, Presumed Innocent makes nostalgia feel fresh.

Unlike your standard issue by-the-numbers thriller, this is classy, captivating, grown-up entertainment.

A rare example of a TV drama which expands significantly on its original source material yet never feels baggy or indulgent, and will keep you guessing every step of the way.

While it’s going about unspooling the threads of its complex plot, Presumed Innocent is very good at being old-fashioned, episodic television.

Kelley shows here that a series can be talky yet still tense, and often fascinating, with the right cast.

It just works, even if using such gimmicks as violent dream sequences sometimes feels like pushing the envelope a little too hard. But even that fits within the show's context and slippery texture as it navigates between lies and truths, hatred and love, volatile obsession and tender intimacy.

“Presumed Innocent” — two episodes are currently available, with new episodes arriving on Wednesdays — remains a solid beach read of a whodunit. Apple TV+, which premiered the series on Wednesday, did not provide critics with the final episode, and I still don’t feel sure of who committed the crime — always a good sign.

It loses the thread a little as Peter Sarsgaard tries to top his real-life brother-in-law by playing someone who is somehow even more unlikable. Thankfully, Ruth Negga offsets them both by offering a stabilizing presence to both the central murder mystery and the show itself.

Rusty, who is both the investigator and the accused, is not sympathetic, nor does Gyllenhaal make him interestingly unsympathetic. .... Negga makes a strong impression as Barbara. .... It’s a straightforward, mostly unfussy, workman-like production.

"Presumed Innocent" has a lot going for it, including sensational performances by Peter Sarsgaard, Bill Camp and Gabby Beans. But we've been burned by Mr. Kelley before. .... Ms. Negga is largely wasted, her moody scenes involving a revenge fling with a hunky bartender (Sarunas J. Jackson) ratcheting the considerable tension down; Barbara seems washed out by her husband's behavior. But Mya is refreshingly no-nonsense.

Their [Rusty and Barbara's] emotional interactions give Presumed Innocent the heft it needs to escape from its otherwise generic identity. In the process, Gyllenhaal and Negga deliver excellent, all-encompassing work.

The updated “Presumed Innocent” somehow manages to be far longer and yet much thinner than the original.

We’re cautiously optimistic that David E. Kelley has taken Presumed Innocent in a direction that’s not only distinctive from the novel and film, but has done so in an watchable way. We might need a few more episodes to know for sure, though.

The performances are uniformly good and involving but never quite enough to overcome the slick soullessness that is the hallmark of every Kelley production. You never quite care. It never quite means anything.

Presumed Innocent does have its moments, but in terms of making a case for committing to sit through eight chapters, Kelley, Gyllenhaal and company haven’t exactly put together an open-and-shut case.

Tonally, the thriller from Kelley’s back catalogue that Presumed Innocent has most in common with is The Undoing, in which Hugh Grant, as a top Manhattan doctor married to Nicole Kidman, turns out to have horridly murdered his beautiful girlfriend. The gloss can’t quite conceal the hollows.

All in all, Presumed Innocent is a somewhat unremarkable series, bolstered by its remarkable performances. It's an acting masterclass, with a strong central premise that has simply been stretched too thin.

David E. Kelley's indulgent adaptation plods over eight episodes. [24 Jun - 14 Jul 2024]

Presumed Innocent is so defined by its climactic twist that Kelley has to find more zigging and zagging to stretch things over eight hours, however briskly directors Anne Sewitsky and Greg Yaitanes move the proceedings along. Certainly the story hasn’t been expanded or enhanced with contemporary resonance.

There’s a version of “Presumed Innocent” that reaches for the humanity of its characters more, but Kelley is so intent on the soap opera courtroom dynamics that he can’t be bothered to do that, at least not at the office. The show handles its characters better outside of the legal arena.

The TV remake of “Presumed Innocent” (officially an update of Scott Turow’s 1987 novel) makes some desperate gambits to fill out its episodes, and the emptiness underneath its dedicated performances proves just as nagging as the monotonous repetition of the same two queries, hour after hour, all the way through the finale (which was not screened for critics).

Gyllenhaal isn’t exactly stretched as the ambiguous (egotistic, deceitful) Rusty, but he and Sarsgaard are the only reasons to watch.

Jake Gyllenhaal dishonors Ford with a perplexingly flat 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. .... Presumed Innocent stretches a story that worked perfectly as two-hour movie to three times that length, rendering it all but inert.

Anyone with even vague memories of the film will grow impatient, while viewers new to the material will likely wonder how so much talent resulted in such a middling show.

What's clear is that the streamer was shooting for something like Sky's The Night Of, a brooding 2016 thriller set in the New York justice system. But Presumed Innocent fails to be anything like it – nowhere near as shocking, sexy or satisfying. With this much investment and this much talent, such a misfire feels almost criminal.

After watching seven of its eight episodes, I didn’t really care. .... While Polhemus doesn’t come into focus as much more than a sex object, the real victims in this “Presumed Innocent” are the performers. .... The revelation of who killed Carolyn Polhemus, if and when it comes, feels as if it will be just a piece of accounting.