Will Bryan Cranston’s judge get out of jail in Your Honor season 2?
Bryan Cranston’s judge wants to die in his jail cell but the law isn’t finished with him yet in season two of Your Honor.
Peter Moffat’s Your Honor has returned, continuing the taut and quite harrowing story in which a distinguished New Orleans judge discovers his lawful world is really a false construction. The judge’s world changes when the life of his son is threatened and he becomes complicit in covering up a murder.
But morality isn’t the only thing with which he must contend, and that justice is itself a much more subjective notion than the clear and written strictures of the law.
Your Honor is created by British barrister turned highly successful screenwriter Moffat, creator of a number of miniseries and telefilms. His British drama about the court system, Criminal Justice, was adapted as the HBO miniseries The Night Of. His other work includes Einstein and Eddington, Hawking, Cambridge Spies, Silk and The Last Post.
For the first time in his career, Moffatt worked in an American-style writers’ room. “The whole starting point for who was going to be in the room was, ‘Who can tell me things I don’t know?’” he told The Guardian. “It’s always tempting to surround yourself with like-minded folk, and I decided to do the opposite. I made sure all of the writers were from very different backgrounds from mine, and from each other, so that it was a genuinely diverse group that could represent all kinds of sectors of society. It was an unbelievably exciting experience.”
The series was adapted by Moffat from the Israeli legal drama Kvodo, created by Ron Ninio and Shlomo Moshiah. It’s another fine example of the way Israel is delivering compelling, character-driven thrillers to the streaming world of TV.
Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston returns as respected local judge Michael Desiato, and brilliant he is too, an actor now of vast experience and intuition. He is forced to test both his moral sense and his family’s safety after his son Adam (Hunter Doohan), an asthmatic 17-year-old son scrambling for his inhaler, kills a young man riding a motorcycle in a hit-and-run incident.
After attempting to save him, Adam drives off. It’s later revealed the dead young man is the son of feared New Orleans Mafia boss, played so menacingly and convincingly by Michael Stuhlbarg.
It all started when Moffat received a call from Israeli producer Liz Glotzer who asked him what he would do if one of his children were responsible for a hit-and-run accident. And then came another question: what if you get to the police station to report it only to discover the father of the victim was a famous mob boss? Do you turn around knowing your child will not be safe should you come clean?
Moffat says he stayed up all night thinking and writing notes. Among his thoughts were the crucial questions: “What is your first step in handling the situation and what does that mean? What has the parent done, what has he become, and are you the same person you thought you were before you took that first step?”
As the series develops, the judge’s sense of identity and self blur the moment he recognises the crime boss when he attempts to turn his son in to the police. It radically destabilises the world and his relation to it. The clock is ticking, and horizons quickly shrink to a kind of claustrophobic enclosure.
The first series ended dramatically. A lot of plot twists and turns lead up to this point, acts of retaliation, murders, explosions and a trial rigged with the involvement of drug boss Baxter, the judge losing his honour, his integrity and his reputation in trying to protect his son.
The second season, directed by Peter Sollett and photographed by veteran Michael Grady (On the Basis of Sex, The Leftovers, Ozark), is about redemption – can a person be forgiven for his sins? We meet a dishevelled Desiato in prison for tax evasion. It’s sometime after the tragic ending to season one and we’re given flashbacks to the immediate aftermath of the terrible events of the mistaken killing, and the cover-up that follows.
Desiato is heavily bearded, emaciated and can hardly stand. Told by a prison doctor, “We’re not about to let you die”, he’s force-fed nutritional substances in a couple of horrific scenes.
Disbarred, disgraced and all but destroyed, he languishes in the decaying jail while a power struggle develops on the streets between the crime family the Baxters and Big Mo, leader of the black gang Desire.
Big Mo is played superbly by the enthralling Andrene Ward-Hammond who never has to raise her voice to exude a chilling power. Having a smaller presence in the first season, she has a kind of transforming role to play in the second and final.
As the judge contemplates death – “why can’t you people let me die in peace?” he laments – district attorney Olivia Delmont, a superb Rosie Perez, visits him in prison. Determined to destroy Baxter’s power and his hold over the city, she proposes a deal with Desiato, involving the burying of the confession that led to his incarceration.
She orchestrates his release but only after he attempts suicide by entering the medieval Prison Rodeo, playing Convict Poker in a huge arena with several other convicts as a giant bull called Malachi attempts to kill them. Playing cards at a small table in the centre of the arena, they are trampled, catapulted, and gored by the furious beast.
They’re thrown from the animals and land on their wrists, shoulders, and even necks and heads. It is an extraordinary sequence, and unlike anything I’ve seen recently in its crowd-pleasing brutality and existential sense of depravity.
The sequence is based to some extent on the way Moffatt, no stranger to the British prison system, and feeling pretty unshockable, found the world of American jails.
In Louisiana, he visited Angola Penitentiary, where an actual Prisoner’s Rodeo is held twice a year. It’s the largest maximum security prison in America and houses hundreds of violent criminal offenders.
Most of its prisoners serve life sentences for rape, armed robbery, murder, and other heinous crimes. It’s where, says Moffatt, “some people are treated like animals. The iconography is astonishing – in a country whose original sin is the enslavement of black people, they can put people in chains and make them work in fields, on a former plantation. It’s the most appalling thing.”
The new season is emotionally tense and grim but moves with exciting pacing and nice noir plotting. It really is one of the best crime shows going round. This is a disquieting drama that suggests the rules of conventional morality are provisional and certainly precarious.
It’s an unsettling but distressing representation of what can happen to someone when it feels like all faith and hope and personal conviction have been taken away. And how easily lives turn on quirks of fate, and the idea that the universe has an order and that no matter how hard you try, you can’t get away from it.
Moffatt and his co-writers challenge our easy assumptions and presuppositions about what might happen to Desiato, and build on our hope that things will be properly, righteously resolved. And at the same time, they reinforce our suspicion that these expert crafters of fiction will dump us out of the moral fantasy that tells us mysteries are always solved on TV and the good people triumph.
Your Honour, streaming on Stan.