Accused - Under Fire: The Judicial Anthology Between Missed and Kept Promises

An American court of justice. The defendant enters the courtroom accompanied by lawyers while photographers' flashes try to capture the perfect moment. The viewer does not yet know what crime has been committed nor the circumstances that led the accused to that hot seat. And that's when the journey backward begins to discover these events, with the defendant's point of view dissected by the script, in a series of flashbacks that lead us to discover their story.

The opening episode stars Michael Chiklis as an accomplished neurosurgeon who discovers his teenage son is planning a school shooting. The second introduces us to Ava, played by Stephanie Nogueras, a deaf woman who acted as a surrogate mother for a couple. When it's discovered that the born child is also deaf, the situation takes an unexpected turn. In the third, young Danny becomes convinced that the nurse who cared for his late mother, who died after a serious illness, is plotting to ruin his family. And so on, with each episode revealing a different drama with more or less serious criminal consequences.

Accused - Who is without sin?

The 2023 Fox anthology series created by Howard Gordon (also author of 24 and Homeland) and based on the 2010 BBC series by Jimmy McGovern, now lands on Sky and NOW, for an audience of viewers more obsessed than ever with the true-crime genre. We are faced with an ambitious operation, which aims to overturn the perspective of classic legal dramas: an objective that, it must be said, is only partially achieved, since the change of perspective does not always manage to truly offer that sense of novelty that could have been expected.

As we have already introduced, instead of following lawyers or investigators grappling with investigations and the resolution of judicial truth, each individual piece puts us in the shoes of the accused, implicitly asking the viewer what they would have done in their place. A premise that is intriguing on paper but with an uneven execution, oscillating between poignant and plausible episodes and others that succumb to emotional blackmail, in a mix that is not so cohesive.

A sensation already evident in the first three episodes, clearly and distinctly. The first remains the most realistic, with the drama of a father unable to manage a problematic son, caught between the shadow of suspicion and murderous thoughts that risk undermining the foundations of the family unit. The second, while introducing sensitive themes and taking us into the complex reality of people affected by deafness, already suffers from some structural contrivances, a flaw that is further exacerbated in the next, with the figure of the presumed villain entrusted to Rachel Bilson from The O.C., in a role that is far too over-the-top and clashes with the underlying premise, turning the central theme of schizophrenia into a caricature within the narrative dynamics.

Time to decide

A factor that prevents a full exploration of the vicissitudes and emotions of the various characters is the limited average duration, with those forty-five minutes appearing far too concise to lucidly delve into the gray areas of the human soul, giving the impression of witnessing a chess game managed by fate in a race against time to conclude everything before the credits roll.

Accused - Under Fire demonstrates the will to tackle complex moral dilemmas but does not allow itself adequate space to do so exhaustively, preventing us from learning more about these figures who thus inevitably remain only on the surface. And in a series where the intrinsic strength would want to be characterized not so much by the outcome of the trial but rather by the exploration of complex themes and the representation of the American criminal justice system, the lack of greater depth risks being a serious absence, even if the solid cast of guest-stars in front of and behind the camera guarantees a respectable production.