Created by David E. Kelley and based on Scott Turow’s 1987 novel of the same name, Presumed Innocent is a twisty legal thriller revolving around a murky case and morally compromised characters. We won’t find out who’s guilty until the very end of the Apple TV+ series, but with each reveal we start to realize that nobody is entirely innocent.
Rusty Sabich (Jake Gyllenhaal), Chicago’s chief deputy prosecutor, appears to be living the dream, cleaning up the streets by day and returning to his luxurious home at night to crash on the couch with his beautiful wife, Barbara (Ruth Negga), and their two children, Jaden (Chase Infiniti) and Kyle (Kingston Rumi Southwick). But that seemingly idyllic dream turns into a nightmare when Rusty’s colleague and secret lover, Carolyn Polmheus (Renate Reinsve), is brutally murdered and he finds himself at the very top of the suspects list.
Given Gyllenhaal’s propensity for playing weirdos, it’s initially striking how the straight-laced Rusty seems far from hunched up, bug-eyed creatures of the night that the actor portrayed in films like Donnie Darko, Nightcrawler, and Prisoners. In fact, it’s Rusty’s normal-ness that makes him so unsettling in the show’s early episodes: Even as his colleagues are mourning Carolyn’s gruesome death, he continues to breeze into rooms with a neighborly smile.
It’s almost as if the series is using our familiarity with Gyllenhaal’s past roles against the audience, given that we’re never quite sure how to take his character here. And that’s the crux of Presumed Innocent, because it’s quickly made clear that Rusty isn’t exactly the person he first appears to be. As the investigation, and then the trial, bring his dirty secrets to light, even his family begins to wonder if they really know him.
Rusty’s best friend and former boss, Raymond Horgan (Bill Camp), has his doubts too, though he still agrees to defend the man in court. Camp plays Horgan like a late-career George Foreman, slouching toward his opponents before demolishing them with a flurry of forceful questions, put-downs, and rebuttals, all delivered in a distinctly sonorous voice. Camp is also the first person to put this much music into the phrase “fuck off” since Brian Cox in Succession, and the first few episodes provide him with plenty of opportunities to display this gift.
On the other side of the courtroom are ambitious District Attorney Nico Della Guardia (O-T Fagbenle) and his sidekick, Molto (Peter Sarsgaard), with both Fagbenle and Sarsgaard giving enjoyably combative performances. Sarsgaard skulks around with his face pulled into a self-pitying wince while Fagbenle delivers every line in the languid, nasal tone of an aristocrat making pronouncements while reclining on a chaise longue.
With these almost reptilian figures of the law in one corner and Rusty’s friends and family in the other, it would have been easy for Presumed Innocent to settle for being a thriller about good versus evil, but the actual story here is much more opaque. Each episode adds a new detail that gives a character a reason to be less than truthful or which blurs their motivation in some way.
Across the seven of eight episodes made available for review, Presumed Innocent skillfully tugs at our sympathies and our suspicions, playing with the titular concept of “presumed” innocence. Finding out that Rusty lied about some things doesn’t necessarily mean he’s lying about the murder, and discovering that Molto may have personal reasons for wanting to see Rusty convicted doesn’t necessarily mean he’s innocent. But it changes how we feel about them, stretching the presumption of innocence in our minds until it begins to break.
While it’s going about unspooling the threads of its complex plot, Presumed Innocent is very good at being old-fashioned, episodic television. There’s a cliffhanger at the end of just about every episode. And while Rusty, Molto, and company aren’t above employing some questionable tactics to get their version of events across, the series itself never resorts to anything underhanded to obfuscate its story. Perhaps the greatest compliment one can give a legal thriller like Presumed Innocent is that, with one episode remaining, I find myself both unable to confidently say how the case will be resolved and incredibly eager to find out.
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