Of law and horror
Your Honor throws Cranston into a messy and intensely personal moral conflict
Your Honor Crave
The opening of Your Honor is a full horror movie in and of itself. Over 15 tense and terrible minutes, director Edward Berger traces the growing unease of one chilly New Orleans morning with ominous patience. A teenager (Hunter Doohan) wakes up in bed with his girlfriend (Sofia Black-d'elia) and heads out for the day in his car. Across town, a richer teenager gets on his new motorcycle, hugs his doting parents (Michael Stuhlbarg and Hope Davis) and hits the road. Meanwhile, a determined man (Bryan Cranston, also executive producer) jogs through streets and graveyards with equal urgency. But it's not long before everyone's disparate paths intertwine — quite literally, in the case of the two teenagers, who end up colliding in the middle of a desolate road with a sickening crunch that leaves them both reeling, bloody and begging for help.
In this critical moment, Your Honor is stark, unsparing and effective. The more overwhelmed Adam (Doohan) becomes, the more the camera homes in on his shaking face, making it impossible for the viewer to look away. When Adam finally makes the fateful decision to leave the scene, it feels as classic a horror movie misstep as any: an awful mistake that will cost him more than he can possibly know in that one terrified moment.
Based on the Israeli series Kvodo, the show's linchpin is Cranston's Michael, a judge who prizes morality above all else until Adam, his son, is endangered. But as Your Honor sprawls further out and into the lives of its many characters, it gets lost in the weeds of its storytelling.
The show's attempt to keep the narrative contained results in some truly roundabout reasoning for relating just about every character in the show to another, no matter how implausible. “This is New Orleans — everything connects,” Davis's deadly matriarch purrs at one point, by way of explanation. Yet even as the series finds a way to, for instance, get an unlikely group of people to sit around the same dinner table for the sake of heightened drama, it finds less of a reason for twists like, say, the fact that Adam's girlfriend turns out to be his teacher.
That the show works so hard to include as much story as possible speaks to its overarching ambition. Through its complex web of characters, it explores the politics of race, policing and privilege that define New Orleans — and indeed, as Your Honor would be the first to say, the U.S. as a whole. Men like Michael, a well-off white judge, and Jimmy (an electric, bombastic Stuhlbarg) are able to pull strings for their teenage sons in a way the poorer Black parents of their district can't, with devastating consequences.
For one: 17 year-old Kofi Jones (Lamar Johnson) unwittingly becomes collateral damage of Michael's desperate plans to protect Adam.
But the face of Your Honor isn't Kofi, it's Michael — a “nice” guy who keeps putting powerless people in harm's way to keep his own family safe. Both he and the show may know it's wrong, but that doesn't make it much less disgusting to witness over and over again.