Undefendable
Deeply dour series another disappointment from 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 best-selling 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 weather spells that descend on mediocre mystery dramas.
The body of a dead teenage boy, Ben Rifkin, is discovered amid the fallen leaves in a neighbourhood park.
He was stabbed repeatedly.
A brash (so brash!) prosecutor, Andy Barber (Chris Evans), begins working alongside police detective Pam Duffy (Betty Gabriel) to identify suspects, which includes interviewing students at the middle school where 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.
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.