Your Honor

Your Honor is lifted by uniformly great performances.

It’s a promising dynamic, but it’s not helped by the glacial pacing. When the BBC rattled through War & Peace in six hours, a single-narrative series has a lot to do to earn 10. Your Honor never spends a minute when it can spend two.

Bryan Cranston puts in a typically compelling Bryan Cranston performance. It’s really the only thing saving the show from being clichéd and dull.

Cranston is, unsurprisingly, superb here, as is the rest of the exceptional cast. Unfortunately, much of the material they are working with in Your Honor — developed by Peter Moffat, the British playwright and screenwriter who wrote Criminal Justice, the series that inspired The Night Of — contains so many familiar crime TV elements that it bends toward the tropey. ... The series is not without its compelling moments, though, particularly in the first episode, when Adam gets himself into the trouble that sets up everything that comes next.

Occasionally—in the four episodes (of ten) that I’ve seen—that self-seriousness pays off and the series, adapted from an Israeli show by lauded British dramatist Peter Moffat, achieves a certain tragic gravitas. But much else plays as elegant pulp, rather than the credible, searing inquest into a city and its ills that the series might think it is.

Based on the first four episodes available for preview, “Your Honor” unfortunately doesn’t match the tension of that fateful early sequence. But the 10-episode series does serve up tasty performances, knotty ethical issues, attempts to explore racial injustice in the legal system, crime story theatrics and nagging questions about why its characters do what they do.

After the first episode, the cynical “Your Honor” becomes a little less painful to watch but also more predictable. ... The arrival of the always-welcome Margo Martindale in episode four immediately improves “Your Honor” but it’s not enough to overturn the initial verdict: “Your Honor” is guilty of being a major downer.

Everyone in this cast is tremendous. Cranston and Martindale are especially delectable. ... Beyond these performances, however, isn't much. And ultimately the paucity of substance is obscured by meaty acting becomes this drama's undoing.

“Your Honor” over-invests in tension and under-invests in compassion. Moffat’s story clouds the morality questions evoked by the title’s double meaning, and asks you to see yourself in its characters while fast-forwarding through choices that skew just how honorable our protagonists were in the first place.

No reasonable jury would acquit this series of its lapses in logic, but there are saving graces in the scene-stealing performances of Hope Davis as the mob family's Lady Macbeth and Margo Martindale as Michael's salty mother-in-law. [7 -20 Dec 2020, p.9]

Alas, much of what comes after the forceful opening is a disappointment. ... Cranston’s performance doesn’t quite manage to ground all the coverup commotion; he turns up the volume a little too much on Michael’s desperation.

As “Your Honor” sprawls further out and into the lives of its many characters, it gets lost in the weeds of its storytelling.

Dumb premise threatens to sink promising series.

Bryan Cranston is such a good actor, we’d watch him read a library’s worth of law books rather than play out the story told here. It might not be that dramatic, but at least it wouldn’t be constantly reminding us how much better Breaking Bad was at exploring the same territory.

[The cast] all struggle with a premise and a script that gives them little guidance on how far to go with “Your Honor’s” resolute dourness.