Riveting maze of law, living
The basic story is not unfamiliar: A crusading lawyer sets out to prove the innocence of a man convicted 14 years earlier of murdering a young girl. But the case of Kevin Russell turns out to be more complicated than it first appears in the ITV six-part series “Thriller,” available on Amazon Prime on Friday, Oct. 27.
Emma Banville (Helen McCrory) is a battlescarred veteran of fighting for justice who believes Russell (Sam Swainsbury) was coerced into confessing that he killed the girl by zealous police detective Olivia Greenwood (Wunmi Mosaku). Emma and her partner Dominic Truelove (Jonathan Forbes) push the local police for information to support their drive to get Russell’s conviction overturned. In the process, they enrage the still grieving parents of the murdered girl (Cathy Murphy and Rick Warden).
Fearless: Legal thriller, miniseries. Available Friday, Oct. 27, on Amazon Prime.
Also unnerved by the idea of his father going free is Russell’s biological son, Jason (Jack Hollington), whose mother, Anne (Rebecca Callard), has remarried but believes in her ex’s innocence.
Emma and Dominic also touch another nerve, and it’s not clear for a long time how it relates to their case. Among those taking interest in Emma’s efforts on Russell’s behalf are a former minister in Tony Blair’s Cabinet, Sir Alastair McKinnon (Michael Gambon), and a well-connected American woman named Heather Myles (Robin Weigert). A local politician also seems to be taking an interest in the case, for reasons that are unclear.
All of this is far more than just window-dressing on a familiar story line. Writer-creator Patrick Harbinson (“Homeland,” “24,” “Person of Interest”) displays a masterful understanding of the necessary balance between plot and character here. He carefully and credibly builds obstacles for Emma to overcome in getting her client exonerated. At the same time, he builds Emma as a complex and credible character. As obsessively dedicated as she is about fighting for the underdog, she is feeling driven by events in her own life. Her beloved father (Jack Shepherd) is dying. She is desperate to adopt a child, but is encountering resistance because of the chaotic nature of her job and because she hasn’t been 25 for quite some time.
The performances are pitch-perfect, especially McCrory’s. The world is closing in on Emma, and McCrory communicates an unsettling sense of desperation and determination about it. She cannot keep her father alive, the possibility of adopting a child is out of her hands — so of course, she pushes harder on behalf of Kevin Russell and other seemingly hopeless cases in her professional life.
On some levels, the story unfolds slowly, naturalistically. What seems at first like a wellmade British legal thriller remains that for the three of the six episodes Amazon sent for review, but by the third episode, the story has grown far more complex, leaving a lot to unravel in the final three episodes of the miniseries.