3 out of 5

Developed by: Howard Gordon

A simple but intriguing tweak on the court procedural: staging each hour-long drama limited to the defendant’s point of view, often putting us in position to be sympathetic with someone whose actions we might otherwise be quick to judge.

That is, of course, the point, with Howard Gordon’s adaptation of the same-named UK series using that setup to poke at many modern-era talking points: school shootings, race relations, class interplay, gender politics, and etc. On the whole, this gives many strong actors the ability to act in greyer areas than most media – tempted to cast clearer heroes and villains – would allow, and the questions / scenarios raised and explored in each episode are all valid, and surely mirroring real cases to underline how likely and often it is that our justice system either fails, or isn’t structured to account for certain cases.

The show really gets out ahead of all of this with its strongest episode: ‘Scott’s Story,’ starring Michael Chiklis, asks when the line is crossed that we can consider a family member a monster, and twists the knife even further by making that monster a child. While the limited, single-episode runtime of any given case tends to cause most of the entries to run flat by their conclusions – a lot of that time is needed to set things up, leaving very little time for resolutions – ‘Scott’s Story’ takes advantage of this to build to a chilling final line that unsettles any sense of finality, driving home how the end is not the end in real-life instances of these examples.

Unfortunately, no episode after this lives up to that. While some great concepts are explored, and given fair due, the remainder of the series tends to give us pretty clear Guilty or Innocent verdicts, and the kind of final moments that would come with a “So and so went on to marry happily” or somesuch text overlay, were these films. That is, Accused’s explorations of humanity, first episode aside, only have these humans existing for 60 minutes, instead of lasting beyond the frame. There’s still some very strong writing and acting throughout, and certainly subject matter that can / might trigger some external discussions, but what initially feels like a pretty bold show turns out, perhaps ironically, to be keen on leaving us with some clear takeaways.