Undefendable

Deeply dour miniseries another disappointment from Apple TV+

Defending Jacob Streaming, Apple TV+

These days, you don’t need a TV critic to tell you that teenagers are hard to love. Harder still when they’re charged with first-degree murder and seem coldly indifferent to the outcome, like 14-year-old Jacob Barber (Jaeden Martell), the little creep at the centre of Apple TV+’S sluggish and deeply dour miniseries Defending Jacob.

Based on William Landay’s bestselling 2012 novel, the series opens on what begins as a typical morning in Newton, Mass., which appears to be caught in one of those never-ending, drizzly Gloom-o-vision weather spells that descend on mediocre mystery dramas.

The body of a dead teenage boy, Ben Rifkin, is discovered amid the fallen leaves on an incline in a neighbourhood park. He was stabbed repeatedly.

A brash (so brash!) prosecutor, Andy Barber (superhero moviedom’s Chris Evans), begins working alongside police detective Pam Duffy (Get Out’s Betty Gabriel) to identify suspects — which includes interviewing students at the middle school where both the victim and Andy’s son, Jacob, are eighth-graders.

Does that strike you as inappropriate, given that the prosecutor is too close to the case? Well, just wait until he starts throwing away key evidence.

If you came to Defending Jacob with even the tiniest understanding of due process, you may as well excuse yourself now; the series oversteps so many realworld legal boundaries, with an inexcusably crummy plot and lots of stiff dialogue, that it becomes ridiculously agitating, going far past the genre’s usual dance with plausibility.

The eighth-graders being interviewed by Andy and the police can tell it’s entirely inappropriate, as their texts and social media accounts swirl with rumours that Jacob murdered Rifkin.

It’s here that Andy and his wife, Laurie (Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery), begin to notice the way their son exhibits little in the way of sympathy for the town’s shared grief; he’s evasive with answers, and, oh look, he’s hiding a professional-grade hunting knife in his sock drawer. (Kids!)

The case for watching Defending Jacob is thin indeed, even at this peculiar cultural moment when viewers are willing and able to watch just about anything. Dockery overcomes creator-writer Mark Bomback’s clunksome scripts, once more proving that she has much to offer beyond Downton, while Evans’s performance is as weak and uninspired as can be — rivalled in its flatness only by Martell’s empty take on a troubled teen. To make matters just a little more worse, Defending Jacob drags another two terrific actors down with it: Cherry Jones as Jacob’s defence attorney and J.K. Simmons as Andy’s estranged, imprisoned father.

It takes forever and then some for Defending Jacob to get where it’s going, in eight episodes that could easily have been four — leaving plenty of time for me to wonder why so many of Apple TV+’S original shows fail to impress. It’s not as if Apple isn’t following the same recipe as its competitors, bringing out lavishly produced shows with expert polish and big stars, looking for all the world like something a binge viewer would readily watch.

Yet, as with Defending Jacob, the result is imitation-flavoured television — a chronic occurrence, six months after the streaming service’s launch. There’s a larger mystery there, and someone needs to solve it.