ABC’s ‘Rebel’ with Katey Sagal could use more rule-breaking

Erin Brockovich’s personal story is elementally compelling: That’s why the movie about her works so well. As played by Julia Roberts in 2000’s “Erin Brockovich,” she is a crusader in the legal arena, an advocate who’s less self-taught than simply intuitive. She’s opposed to the establishment on both sides of the courtroom, and her wins don’t come from a sort of legal doublespeak but from her humanity.

This is a tricky balance to strike onscreen. The first two episodes of “Rebel,” a new ABC drama inspired by Brockovich’s work, don’t quite get there. Katey Sagal plays Annie “Rebel” Bello, who works to assist and aid those who have fallen victim to corporate greed. Notably, in the show’s early going, this includes a medical company whose faulty heart valves, we are told, have ruined the health and lives of those unlucky enough to have them implanted.

The show, from its premise, sets itself up as a story of the people taking on the powerful, but tends to trip up over the most basic elaborations of

In “Rebel,” Katey Sagal, pictured in 2015, plays Annie Bello, who works to assist and aid those who have fallen victim to corporate greed. its main idea. “I have nothing against corporations, corporations can do a lot of good,” Rebel tells a TV host in the first episode, referencing her pride in corporate America having produced the COVID-19 vaccine. “I’m a proud American, Marta, I say everyone should earn their living — just, you know, don’t poison people while you do it.”

This invocation of what may be the most impressive and dazzling display of scientific

ingenuity of the young century to make the case that corporations are not all bad feels random, the product of a desire to avoid alienating anyone at all. This impulse crops up again in the series’s second episode, in which a potentially knotty storyline about accusations of racism and assault becomes, in the end, about the “everybody-gets-a-trophy” ethos around young people today. Trying to please everyone is a tricky line to walk when you’re making a show about a person whose life’s calling is fighting the establishment.

Sagal, a performer of charm and seemingly inborn relatability, does her best with the role, though Rebel tends to skitter all over the map. The show gives her a backstory and a set of traits — generous to a fault, somewhat careless in love, obsessively protective of those to whom she’s loyal — that don’t consistently jibe with Sagal’s laid-back persona, or with Rebel’s hazy relationship with her work. We see that Rebel’s career is her life but are left after two episodes unclear of what exactly she sees as her remit, beyond all-purpose fixing.

If anyone is equipped to bring debates about a complicated workplace to human scale for network TV, it’s showrunner Krista Vernoff, entrusted in recent years with “Grey’s Anatomy,” the current standard-bearer for workplace dramas. All the pieces are there to get “Rebel” to a place of real interest. The show simply needs to do better at getting out of its own way, and to exhibit less risk aversion and more of a rebel heart.