Suspicion (2022)

Confidently ambitious, taut and not infrequently exhausting.

Count on breathless excitement and engaging characters to outrun any gaps in logic. ... Disposably entertaining.

Suspicion (Apple+ TV), is a loose, baggy thing that only begins to approach the necessary slickness a good quarter of the way through its eight-episode run.

People staring at screens the whole time (which, admittedly, is probably all that espionage is in the 21st century) is inherently undramatic. I haven’t seen a TV series based around cyber-espionage and infosec that solves this one yet, but thankfully it doesn’t sink Suspicion altogether because the characterisation is strong and the mystery holds.

Suspicion doesn’t spend any time making viewers care about Leo or Katherine, so the entire mission feels very low-stakes. There are bare minimum levels of intrigue, and fans of the genre might even enjoy the ride, but Suspicion has nothing to offer besides an average suspense story.

To say that “Suspicion” is afraid of saying anything real would be inaccurate, as Thurman’s character awkwardly explains the show’s whole thesis statement in a speech late in the series. Yet “Suspicion” still doesn’t seem to know exactly what it’s saying, repurposing its more political source material into a series of middle-of-the-road thriller beats that are never as gripping as they aim to be.

By the time “Suspicion” reaches its heavy-handed conclusion, we hardly care who done it and why they did it.

It feels like Suspicion is a bunch of espionage scenes in search of a cohesive story. The story may reveal itself at some point, but right now, the whole operation feels bland and generic, to the point where we don’t think we’ll be engaged with the story in subsequent episodes.

By the time Suspicion gets there, however, it feels like too little, too late.

Everything turns sloppy and weird in this eight-parter, which premieres Friday on Apple TV+. Based on the Israeli series “False Flag,” the show devolves into a strange hybrid that’s neither tense nor particularly logical.

“Suspicion” seems not to know what it has on its hands — and, while it’s competently made and will divert viewers who are mystery fans, it takes far too long to get truly curious about what spurred the crime at its center, or how a powerful person connects to it. The desire to conceal elements of a mystery has resulted in a story that isn’t much of a story at all.

lternates between being wholly preposterous and egregiously preachy. Were that not enough, though, this U.K. production headlined by Uma Thurman and Noah Emmerich is also interminably dull, dispensing red-herring clues regarding its central mystery with all the grace of a jackhammer and the intrigue of a TED Talk.

Suspicion is convinced of its own cleverness and righteousness, but very little over the course of its eight episodes provides any evidence for either.

Unless you're bored out of your skull, you should save your curiosity for a better show.