Whew! How To Get Away With Murder has a pilot packed with juicy soapy dramatic meat. You will not finish watching and feel like you’ve been left starving for more. In fact, that’s maybe the one glaring flaw of this pilot, a blessing and a curse of making sure that every moment is filled with something for you to chew on. Eventually, it all starts to taste the same.
Shondaland has another hit on their hands. Shonda Rhimes (Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal) serves as executive producer to this Peter Nowalk creation, a legal drama that wants to play with narrative structure as ambitiously as that time travel season of Lost. Okay, not quite but it gets pretty dang close. There are three murders (a case of the week, and two last act reveals that answer tantalizing questions while proposing delicious new ones), and three different time periods to keep track of. Whatever you do, don’t blink, don’t ever blink, blink and you could get lost in the who, what, where, and when. The why isn’t really what matters on Murder.
Lets accede one fact: You have to suspend disbelief to be engrossed in this show. It’s a legal drama, if you like the genre then you’re used to it. Just take the ride and have fun playing the game of whodunit because that’s what this show is all about. At the center of this televised game of Clue is Viola Davis, giving the standout performance as Annalisse Keating, a law professor who calls her class….well, you know what the title of the show is. She’s not concerned with guilt or innocence. She’s only concerned with winning. She’s ambitious, she cheats at her job and on her husband, is renowned for her ruthless cunning and her skills of manipulation. Students are both terrified and in awe of her. She’s a total badass. The law students who we’ll be following all season? Well, they’re players in the game, not really people you’re going to care more about other than will they get caught or will they get away with…wait, I’m jumping around almost as much as the opening.
The show gets to the point right away. Four law students are trying to think their way through getting rid of a dead body. Cut back to the case of the week that they had to deal with at the start of the semester, about four months earlier. Theoretically, they may keep jumping backward and forward until the timeline crescendos to the current moment. This kind of narrative leapfrogging could get tiresome if the execution gets sloppy.
One of this pilot’s strengths is in “finding the game” of a scene so that the students show you who they are, rather than you learning about them from exposition dumps. Each student must present a different defense of Professor Keating’s latest client (a mistress accused of murdering her lover. Don’t worry, she’s not important other than as a means to show you how good Keating is in the courtroom and for Keating to challenge the students to impress her.) Within just a few seconds of watching their presentations you see how each major character thinks, how they present themselves, how they see themselves and wish they could be seen, and then the teacher shows she’s smarter than all of them. You’ve learned everything you need to know about these characters to get a sense of what their dynamics will be with each other and with their common fixation: their teacher/idol.
Each of the main characters does something morally reprehensible (according, to like, legal and societal standards)…and then we watch them burn a body together. There’re no good guys or bad guys in this game. There’s no black and white with any of them. They present themselves as archetypes (the overachiever, the idealist, the scholarship kid, the seducer, and the alpha male) then as we watch the lengths they’ll go to get ahead of each other we start to see more layers underneath. They’ll play against each other and with each other. They’ll deal with a case of the week but have a common challenge for the season: to get away with covering up a murder. I won’t spoil the final reveal but you will be left with a great suspicion that’ll make you want to see if you’ve got the right guess.
So, do you want to play How To Get Away With Murder? I do.
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
-Tie for line of the week, both from Davis (duh): “There’s nothing more than common sense,” and “Never take away a learning opportunity from another student.” Oh, the learning…the learning.
-Davis’ performance is great. Best moment of the week is her after crying to a student that caught her cheating on her husband. She’s secured his silence and he’s left. She then looks into the mirror and wipes her eyes. A lesser actor, and a lesser character, would smile or cry harder. Instead, we see a poker face. Maybe she can’t even tell the difference anymore between telling a lie and a truth?
-Shonda Rhimes show checklist: LGBT characters? Check! Multiracial casting? Check! Badass women? Check! Scandalous sex scenes? Check! Rejoicing? Check!
-Who else hopes Viola Davis gets to keep her wardrobe? Damn she’s lookin’ boss!
The Dude Recaps: "How To Get Away With Murder," Season 1, Episode 1
