When I first
reviewed Your Honor way back in December of 2020, I thought it had the
potential for greatness. Bryan Cranston was in the process of giving another
performance that would get him multiple award nominations, the cast was one of
the best of a Limited Series that Showtime had assembled to that point, and the
spiraling plot had the makeup of so many of the great limited series that Peak
TV had been treated to for the past several years and continues to enjoy.
My opinion of
it dropped dramatically before it was over. None of this had anything to do
with the cast: Cranston was magnificent throughout, and the ensemble was
extremely good, from Michael Stuhlbarg and Hope Davis, two of the most
undervalued character actors of this era, down to the always reliable Isaiah
Whitlock, Jr. and Margo Martindale. But
the longer the series went on, it became harder and harder to overlook the gaps
in the plot and the coincidences that the viewer was asks to believe.
The set-up we
got in the Pilot was a good one: Judge Michael DiSanto learned that his teenage
son had been involved in a hit-and-run that left another boy dead. He prepares
to turn his son, but then learns that the child he killed was the son of Jimmy
Baxter (Stuhlbarg) the most ruthless crime boss in New Orleans. He then does
everything in his power to protect his son, which eventually will lead to the corruption
of his robe, and a string of murders and horrible violence. Your Honor had
the plot and the cast of a great series. But almost from the start there were
too many problems.
The biggest of
them involved the Baxter family itself. Jimmy Baxter is set up to be this
violent monster, capable of great evil. But from the pilot on, he is shown as
the model of restraint and patience. That’s not a problem when it comes to the
nature of Stuhlbarg as an actor: his entire career is modeled on showing
restraint and calm. Where it falls down in the plotting of Your Honor is
that from the moment we meet him, Gina (Davis) is shown to be angrier and more
controlling one, forcing everybody around her to act as she fits and almost
always overriding her husband, including orchestrating the plan for her older
son to murder the young man she feels responsible for her son’s murder. It was
never believable for a moment that Jimmy Baxter could control a crime family
when he could never control his actual one. Even less believable was the fact
that his daughter Fia, the quieter more modest child who Jimmy always got along
with better than his son or his wife, could somehow be completely oblivious to
her family’s criminal activities well past the murder of her brother. Even in the second season, she is still
trying to fundamentally deny everything her father does as ‘rumors’ more than
anything else. That at some level she still wants to be a part of the family even
after we learn about her makes the character either willfully blind or ridiculously
naïve.
I’d actually
argue that was the biggest flaw in the first season, but it wasn’t. No, the
biggest problem was a plot twist that was not only unworthy of Peak TV but that
would barely be acceptable in a 1980s soap. Out of Michael Juniors guilt, he
encountered Fia and the two fell in love. Michael Junior never revealed his
secret, of course, and kept seeing Fia despite knowing full well how dangerous it
was if they ever got a hint of the truth. The entire relationship undermined
everything that was going on involving the major action, and it made you
question the intelligence of the writers if they really thought the viewers
could accept this.
Even that did
not sicken me as how it looked like the series was going to end. After Carlo
Baxter ended up being found not guilty (entirely due to Michael’s manipulation
of the trial) the victim’s brother bought a gun and went out to shoot Carlo at
the Baxter hotel. Michael frantically tried to get there to get his son out of
there – only to arrive to see him take a bullet that was meant for Carlo and
die in his father’s arms. I’ve had problems with the endings of many limited
series in the last several years, but I don’t think any have made me
fundamentally feel like they had wasted my time the way the last minutes of Your
Honor did. Maybe the writers thought that this was supposed to be the
ultimate tragic irony. To me, it just seemed
to render everything I had watched for nearly three months pointless. Michael
had thrown his entirely career and life away to protect his son – and his son
died regardless.
In hindsight, I
now consider Your Honor the weakest limited series I saw from the start
of their highpoint – probably 2016 with the debut of anthologies like Fargo and
American Crime Story as well as more compact series like The Night Of
and The Night Manager – to the present day. Unlike too many limited
series that have gone one to have second seasons – Big Little Lies and
perhaps Nine Perfect Strangers – there was a far better reason to give Your
Honor a second season. Despite the conclusion, there were too many loose ends
left unresolved and in that sense, it made sense to bring it back for Season as
they finally did this January. Unfortunately, the fundamental problems with the
series have not been changed in the interim: the performances are still
magnificent, but the writing is at its core, beyond lacking.
Now I do get the
reasoning behind the motivation for the action that propels Season 2. But from
the get-go, nothing about is any more plausible, realistically or dramatically.
In the beginning of Season 2, Michael is now in jail for his part in corruption
and has lost all will to live. He has completely rejected his entire support
system, refuses psychiatric help and visitors and in the season premiere, seems
very determined to kill himself. So the visit of Olivia (Rosie Perez) a federal
prosecutor who wants to use him to bring down the Baxter family is handled
badly from the start and shows no realization of it.
Olivia makes
not even the barest effort to try and show either sympathy or empathy with
Michael, approaching him like any other felon. When she meets with the judges
determined to prosecute Michael, she has already made up her mind that he’s going
to do this even though he hasn’t signed on. To any other agent with a soul or a
brain, it would be crystal clear that Michael is the worst possible person to
try and recruit for this – he doesn’t care about anything and wants very badly
just to die. Yet when Olivia visits him after his near death experience, she
actually tries to joke about what happen and then after another refusal,
basically blackmails him into making ‘the right choice’.
Olivia can’t
even be bothered to show the minimum about of sympathy or even empathy for what
Michael is going through or even for his well-being for the danger he’s putting
himself in. “Have I given you the impression any of this voluntary?” she tells
him at one point. She can barely be bothered to mouth the words assuring him of
his safety. Michael is just a tool to her. The fact that he might only be doing
this so that he can get killed probably doesn’t bother her as long as she can
hang on the Baxter rap sheet at the end. I’ve seen heartless representatives of
the law over time, but I’ve rarely seen someone so utterly blind to the
consequences of what she’s trying to do.
But that’s to
be expected from the writers of Your Honor who are so concerned with the
consequences of everything that happens that they don’t even bother to go
through what that makes their characters look like as a result. This is particularly
true when it comes to Gina, who clearly doesn’t even seem to be a human being.
Her daughter has now lost her brother and her boyfriend, and she doesn’t even
care one bit about Fia’s grief. In a scene in a hotel room with her daughter,
she seems to care about the condition of the room rather than how her daughter
is feeling. When her daughter curses at her – something she has no problem
Carlo or Jimmy doing – she berates her for her language and slaps her across
her the face. She barely paid any
consequence to her husbands actions in Season 1, and when her son does
something risky that could have gotten him killed, she is angrier at Jimmy for
not acting out in retribution then her son’s own actions. Davis is a great
actress, but there’s nothing for her to work with any more than a haranguing banshee.
And that’s true
with just about everyone else. No one wants to show anything resembling the
bare minimum of a human side. Eugene (Whitlock) whose still reeling from
everything that has happened to his godson and best friend, nevertheless, puts
his personal feelings above his own ambition. Jimmy is now essentially a figurehead
among his own family whose strategies will never be listened to and will never
take responsibility for what has happened to his daughter. All the characters
in both crime families, including the bosses, have no control over anything
that their soldiers do and whose words of wisdom have long since stop
mattering.
Cranston alone
manages to stand above the material because Michael is the only character in
this entire show who has motivations that are completely understandable and
sympathetic. He spent half of Season 1 trying to control everything to keep his
son safe until the ripples eventually became too much and he lost everything. Now
every moment of his time on screen we can tell he is a man who has no
motivation to keep going and who may only be doing what he is not for
redemption but oblivion. Only at the end of the second episode does their come
a revelation (which is barely a surprise) that may give him the slightest bit
of daylight at the end of the tunnel and the barest reason to live. You can
argue in a way that this is a better performance than his work as Walter White,
both because he is infinitely more sympathetic and, frankly, because the writing
is so much worse than it was on Breaking Bad.
I don’t know if
I have it in me to follow Your Honor to the conclusion the rest of the
way. There are a lot of good actors to appreciate, and the direction is
absolutely spot on. I just find it very hard to stay committed to a series that
has decided to concentrate more on the consequences of actions rather than
whether the character’s actions were in themselves realistic. What I can say
with certainty is this. If you haven’t watched the first season of Your
Honor, don’t. At the end of the day whatever strengths the series might
have are ultimately outweighed by its weaknesses. The entire cast is worth seeing,
but in basically any other project they’ve done then this one. I’m committed
mainly because of my prior investment. There are too many better series in Peak
TV for the viewer to watch than to waste time with this one.
My score: 2
stars.
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