“Presumed Innocent” fails to be truly compelling

Prosecutor Rusty Sabich (Jake Gyllenhaal) is accused of the murder of another lawyer in the Chicago District Attorney's Office.

The show is a decent legal thriller (it's from David E. Kelly, so the pedigree is there), but some things keep me from liking it.

Jake Gyllenhall is great, and is why I have yet to bail on the show. Rusty has done some bad things. He was having an affair with the lawyer who was killed but is a decent family man otherwise. Gyllenhall plays Rusty as someone who finds himself in a constant fight to protect his family from what is becoming a smear campaign against him. Early on, he owns up to the affair with his children (his wife already knew) and is frank with them about what is going to happen as the investigation goes on.

Here is what is keeping me from liking the show more: DA Guardia (played by O-T Fagbenle) and the lead attorney on the case, Tommy Molto (Peter Sarsgard), don't have any more depth than "Rusty was having an affair with the deceased and we have Rusty, so clearly he did it. Yes, all our evidence is circumstantial, but who cares? We hate Rusty." One thing I cannot stand in media is bad guys who are evil just because the script says so. Even someone like Michael Myers has more depth in the Halloween movies than these two guys do here. They are jerks just for the sake of being jerks.

The show is three episodes in, and I am not hooked yet. I will give it my usual five episodes, but it has yet to do anything interesting. It relies too much on cliffhanger endings and shocking reveals. At this point, I don't care about figuring out who the killer is; I just want to see the smug DA and prosecutor get what's coming to them, and that is not enough to make me watch the whole season.

Presumed Innocent airs on AppleTV+