Television

Standard Of Review: The Merry Band Of Murderers Of ‘How To Get Away With Murder’ Are Back

Viola Davis, who was fantastic in movies like Doubt and The Help, needs to be on a better show.

By Harry Graff on October 08, 2015 2:33 pm

I do not typically put a lot of stock in the Emmy Awards; it is difficult to take them seriously when Modern Family won five straight awards. Nevertheless, one of the highlights of last month’s 2015 Emmys was the acceptance speech given by Viola Davis, who became the first African-American woman to win an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama. In her speech, Davis pointed to the dearth of interesting roles available to her as a black woman, and thanked the writers and producers of her show, ABC’s legal thriller How To Get Away with Murder, for “redefin[ing] what it means to be beautiful, to be sexy, to be a leading woman, to be black.” In an age where many acceptance speeches consist of thanking one’s agent (or, in the case of Game of Thrones co-showrunner David Benihoff, reminding the world that he is married to Amanda Peet), it was an incredibly moving speech. That speech was in the back of my mind as I watched the first two episodes of the second season of How to Get Away With Murder. I could not help but think that Davis, who was fantastic in movies like Doubt and The Help, needs to be on a better show (this column will include spoilers up through last week’s October 1 episode).

For those who have seen an episode of How To Get Away With Murder, Davis plays Annalise Keating, a high-powered criminal defense attorney who (to put it lightly) frequently bends ethical rules in order to win cases. Annalise is also a criminal law professor at a Philadelphia-area law school, and hires several of her 1L students – including Wes Gibbins (Alfred Enoch), Connor Walsh (Jack Falahee), Michaela Pratt (Aja Naomi King), Asher Millstone (Matt McGorry), and Laurel Castillo (Karla Souza) – as interns. While occasionally employing a “case of the week” structure, the first season mostly dealt with two murders – Lila (the mistress of Annalise’s husband Sam (Tom Verica)) and then Sam himself. At the end of the season, there is a third homicide – Rebecca Sutter (Katie Findlay), Wes’s girlfriend and a suspect in Lila’s murder.

The second season picks up right where the first leaves off, as Annalise’s employee Frank (Charlie Weber) gets rid of Rebecca’s body (despite the fact that Frank did not actually kill Rebecca), and Annalise’s former lover Detective Nate Lahey (Billy Brown) has been falsely charged with Sam’s murder after being framed by Annalise. In addition to these carryover plotlines, there is a new main plot arc – Annalise’s defense of Caleb and Catherine Hapstall (Kendrick Sampson and Amy Okuda), who have been charged with murder of their extremely wealthy adopted parents. While Caleb and Catherine protest their innocence, they are certainly suspicious; in one scene Catherine creepily paints a picture of her dead parents. Moreover, even though Caleb and Catherine are adopted siblings and not step-siblings, I could not help but get a Cruel Intentions vibe from them; I expect them to be lovers by about the fifth episode (it doesn’t help that Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character in Cruel Intentions was named Kathryn, or that Ryan Phillippe’s character was named Sebastian, which is also a character name in The Tempest along with Caliban, which is a similar name to Caleb – ok that last one is a bit of a stretch). Just like last season, each episode contains a “flashforward” to a future murder, this time the murder of the attorney prosecuting the Hapstalls, an event in which Annalise has also been shot.

If all that sounds complicated, it is. I have tried to concisely summarize the main plotlines but there are seemingly dozens of other subplots that I have not even mentioned. In its defense, How To Get Away With Murder turns its myriad moving parts into a strength, zipping from one plotline to another, never spending too much time on anything. As a result, I am never bored while watching.

Moreover, Davis has been unsurprisingly excellent these first two episodes of the second season. In one amusing scene, as she is being examined on the witness stand by the prosecutor, Annalise casually and calmly calls out the objections that Nate’s high-profile attorney Eve Rothlow (Famke Janssen) should be making. Later in that scene, Annalise delivers a piercing monologue critiquing the prosecutor’s questioning, with an intensity that elevates her far above any other actor on this show.

But How To Get Away With Murder continues to falter in its utter lack of realism. For example, while the first two episodes of the second season barely focus on law school, at one point Laurel mentions that she has an upcoming Civil Procedure exam to study for. Given the number of cases that they have worked on for Annalise (and the number of murders that they have personally been involved in), it defies belief that these characters are still in their first year of law school, possibly even in their first semester. Hilariously, seemingly the following day, Laurel brags that she received an “A” on the exam, which either means that her professor is the fastest exam grader in history or the exam was a short multiple choice quiz (Question 1: What is the most famous international shoe purveyor that has a Supreme Court personal jurisdiction case named after it?).

The court scenes are equally absurd. For example, in the aforementioned scene where Annalise is questioned under oath on the stand, I could not believe that Rothlow would sit stone-faced as the prosecutor pontificates, badgers witnesses, and asks irrelevant questions. It would be a great drinking game to note every single time an attorney on How To Get Away With Murder does something objectionable in court without recourse.

Moreover, the vast majority of the secondary characters continue to be extremely bland. Laurel, Connor, and Asher are defined mostly by who they are knocking boots with, and are not really real people. With such a large cast, the show needs to do a better job of making the students into characters instead of glorified plot devices.

Despite my criticism, How To Get Away With Murder is still a bonafide commercial hit, as these first two episodes averaged a little less than eight million viewers (it’s a somewhat apples-to-oranges comparison, but Mr. Robot, one of my favorite shows of the year, never had more than two million viewers). Accordingly, as with Suits, I want to revisit How to Get Away With Murder several times over the course of the season to see what aspects of the show are working, what aspects of the show are not working, and at what point the show uses “Bittersweet Sympathy” in order to be completely like Cruel Intentions (to be clear, I am completely on board with this).

Harry Graff is a litigation associate at a firm, but he spends days wishing that he was writing about film, television, literature, and pop culture instead of writing briefs. If there is a law-related movie, television show, book, or any other form of media that you would like Harry Graff to discuss, he can be reached at [email protected]. Be sure to follow Harry Graff on Twitter at @harrygraff19.