'Presumed Innocent' Is the Present and the Future of TV Lawyer Shows
How Rusty is Jake Gyllenhaal's Sabich?
Of all the genres that used to be movies but are now mostly TV shows, the legal thriller has had the most complete transition to television. In the ‘90s, the star power of a Tom Cruise or a Julia Roberts combined with bestselling John Grisham source material was enough to put butts in seats. Legal thrillers could be relied on to make $150 million on a $40 million budget. But studios don’t want to hit doubles anymore, only home runs, so they stopped making mid-budget movies. Legal thrillers were a mid-budget staple, and with a simultaneous decline in their box office success in the 2000s, the genre became a casualty of the Marvelization of cinema, which prioritizes smooth-brained action-comedy at the expense of everything else.
But even though legal thrillers went extinct theatrically, audiences still want to watch them at home. As Suits can show you, the legal drama TV genre is thriving. In an illustrative sign of the times, The Lincoln Lawyer, the last major theatrical legal thriller, got rebooted into a popular Netflix series.
Which brings us to Apple TV+’s new legal thriller limited series Presumed Innocent, a very of-the-moment show.
Presumed Innocent started out as a 1987 novel by Scott Turow, an assistant district attorney-turned-novelist who was big, but never as big as John Grisham. The novel was adapted into a film in 1990 that starred Harrison Ford. The film was a huge, genre-defining hit that spawned many imitators that weren’t quite as successful. It’s the Get Out of legal thrillers.
And now the novel is getting adapted again as a very 2024 limited series. It’s written by David E. Kelley, the prolific lawyer-turned-TV producer who’s been cranking out hits for almost 40 years, from L.A. Law to Ally McBeal to Big Little Lies to Netflix’s The Lincoln Lawyer. Not all of his shows hit, but a lot of them hit super hard. And they’re not all about lawyers, but most of them are. Presumed Innocent is on the “hit” side of the quality scale, and we’ll see how it does in terms of popularity. If it were on HBO instead of Apple TV+, it would be both better and more popular. (Apple TV+’s whole thing is HBO-style shows that aren’t as good as HBO shows because they don’t have HBO’s development team.)
Jake Gyllenhaal, a movie star doing his first TV role (not that that means much anymore), takes over the Harrison Ford role. (This is Apple TV+’s second show that was previously a not-top-10 Harrison Ford movie, following Justin Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast.) Gyllenhaal plays Rusty Sabich, a Chicago prosecutor who becomes a suspect in the murder of his mistress, a woman named Carolyn whom he worked with.
It’s kind of charming that they kept the name Rozat “Rusty” Sabich from the novel, because that’s not a name a prosecutor played by Jake Gyllenhaal in 2024 would have otherwise. The earliest a guy named “Rusty” could have been born is 1965, and “Sabich” is an Israeli sandwich.
The show is very good. It keeps you on your toes. One moment you feel bad for Rusty, and then seconds later you think he’s a piece of shit. One moment you think there’s no way this loving family man could have murdered someone, and in the next breath you’re reminded that he’s a temperamental liar who was totally obsessed with this woman. I won’t get too much into plot details in case you’re unfamiliar with the story, because it’s better to go in knowing as little as possible. But rest assured that it’s a twisty thriller that will keep you guessing about whether Rusty is innocent or not.
Gyllenhaal is really good, like he always is. He can do charismatic leading man and off-putting weirdo character actor, but he rarely does them at the same time like this. And the supporting cast is awesome. Ruth Negga, so complex. Bill Camp, so cranky. Renate Reinsve, so seductive. Peter Sarsgaard, so slimy. I don’t love the blue-tinted color correction that makes it look like it’s being filmed in a hospital, but I do like the shaky handheld cameras and quick cuts that ramp up the anxiety.
Now, on to the question you came here for: Is it a Dad Show? Yes, but it’s not just a Dad Show. It’s a Mom and Dad Show. The reason why legal thrillers are so popular is because they appeal to all audience members who are looking for something mid to watch. Everyone will watch a handsome lawyer fight to prove someone’s innocence or unravel a legal conspiracy. Legal thrillers are suspenseful without being ultraviolent, and are about relationships while still being heavily plot-driven.
Rusty Sabich is a good dad and a bad husband. His wife tells their kids “Your father is a good man, and I think he loved her,” referring to the woman he was having an affair with he’s now accused of murdering. He’s not a Cool Guy, and he might be a Bad Guy. But whatever he is, he’s an Interesting Guy.
Presumed Innocent is of-the-moment, but the moment is changing. We’re at the tail end of the movie star-driven splashy limited series era, and we’re heading into an era where streaming services make shows that feel more like traditional TV. The Lincoln Lawyer was ahead of the curve on that when it premiered in 2022. It’s an ongoing series that could run for many years. Rather than casting an established star in the lead, producers bet on Manuel Garcia-Rulfo becoming a star, which is how TV historically works. It’s more like Suits than an HBO show. And speaking of Suits, that show’s original home USA Network just announced it’s making a series adaptation of John Grisham’s The Rainmaker, its first original series since 2020. Studios are starting to rely on TV lawyer dramas even more than they used to.
I wrote about why you should watch HBO’s wonderful docuseries Ren Faire.
HBO loves stories about succession.
There's Succession, of course, but also Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. And now there's Ren Faire, a three-part docuseries that's available to watch in its entirety on Max.
HBO understands the inherent dramatic stakes of succession stories, which are always about power, desire, and conflict, and contain larger-than-life characters with fascinating flaws.
Ren Faire has all of those things, and unlike Succession and Game of Thrones, it's real.
Read the whole thing at TV Guide.
Also, my House of the Dragon review got quoted in HBO’s press release announcing the Season 3 renewal lol.
