SummaryEach episode features a new defendant preparing to hear the verdict before flashbacks tell how they ended up on trial in the Howard Gordon crime drama anthology series based on the British series of the same name.
SummaryEach episode features a new defendant preparing to hear the verdict before flashbacks tell how they ended up on trial in the Howard Gordon crime drama anthology series based on the British series of the same name.
Over the first five episodes that were presented to critics for review, the show largely lives up to its billing as a promising freshman series, telling a diverse array of stories that illustrate the blurring divide between guilt and innocence in today’s world.
[The “Accused” premiere] made me want to see Chiklis in a series again, maybe playing against his tough-guy type. Future episodes deliver diminishing returns.
It's broadcast television for those looking for something deeper than broadcast television, and cable television for those who don't have the attention span.
Even though “Accused” moves from city to city and case to case each week, and there are different directors behind the camera, there’s a certain sameness to the visual tones; the series has the competent but not particularly stylish look of a crime procedural from the 1990s.
There’s not enough ballast, enough sense of who these characters are outside the most extreme moments of their lives, to keep the show balanced. One remembers a function lawyers and judges play on shows like these: They’re old pros who’ve seen it all, and so correct for the defendants’ tendencies to experience wild emotional swings. Those swings, on “Accused,” are watchable and a lot of fun, but they also mean the show sheds more heat than light.
In the short time on hand, the series can’t escape its courtroom framing and so its protagonists end up more as numbers on a case file than complex individuals. And the crimes in each episode, however terrible, do not create intrigue or cause fright. They do disturb, but “Accused” does nothing with the discomfort it causes, making the whole exercise feel cheap and tawdry. What a waste.