Review

Your Honor, episode 1 review: Bryan Cranston plays a nice guy turned bad, ring any bells?

The jury is out on the Breaking Bad star's moody legal drama, which is heavy on atmosphere but low on excitement

Bryan Cranston as judge Michael Desiato
Bryan Cranston as judge Michael Desiato Credit: Showtime

In Sky Atlantic’s glossy new prestige drama, Your Honor, Bryan Cranston plays an upstanding member of society sucked into a whirlpool of violence, deceit and moral bankruptcy. You’ve got to wonder why they thought of Cranston for the job. It’s probably because he was so good as the dad in Malcolm in the Middle. 

Cranston is predictably riveting as New Orleans judge Michael Desiato, who is drawn to the dark side after his son (Hunter Doohan) kills the scion of a major crime family in a hit-and-run accident. But of course it’s impossible to watch Your Honor without thinking of Breaking Bad and Cranston’s blistering performance as chemistry teacher-turned-avenging meth lord Walter White. 

The similarities ran deep in an opening episode heavy on atmosphere but often low on excitement. Breaking Bad unfolded against the singular backdrop of Albuquerque, New Mexico, with its expansive blue sky and endless desert. 

Your Honor is meanwhile set in New Orleans, that city located on the geographical and psychological precipice of America and the feeling of not being in Kansas any more is powerfully conveyed. Corruption runs deeper here – as confirmed in a sequence in which police officers delivered to the mob a young man wrongly suspected of killing the gangster’s boy.

Yet if Breaking Bad was a slow burn, Your Honor started at the pace of a tortoise creeping through treacle. Much of the opening instalment was given over to establishing the sense of New Orleans as a place where the American dreams was fraying at the edges. All was dark, moody and slightly stultifying. 

Hunter Doohan
Hunter Doohan Credit: Showtime

But then came a wrenching set-piece where Adam Desiato suffered an asthma attack while driving and accidentally  collided with Rocco Baxter's motorbike. A gory scene in which the maimed teenager coughed up a lake of blood confirmed the injures were fatal. Panicking, Adam fled, though he left behind an inhaler smeared with his DNA. 

His appalled father insisted his son face justice. However, plans quickly changed when, on arriving at the police station, he discovered the dead kid was related to the local equivalent of the Corleones. This is New Orleans and long before trial Adam would come to a sticky end at the hands of Rocco’s parents, Jimmy and Gina Baxter (Michael Stuhlbarg and Hope Davis). An added complication is that Michael and Adam are still processing their grief over the death of their wife and mother 12 months previously. 

Your Honor went to great lengths to portray Judge Desiato as initially on the side of the angels. We saw him demolish the false testimony of a corrupt police office, thus saving a mother from jail. Yet that was merely to throw into relief the extent of his ethical downfall as he concealed evidence of his son’s role in the death of the Baxter boy.  

Cranston is always watchable and brought some of Walter White’s scorched earth intensity as Desiato’s world started to crumble. But after one episode the jury is still out on whether Your Honor is an American epic to rival Breaking Bad or merely another cliche-drenched character study of a doomed anti-hero. It could go either way way – though no matter what happens, it’s probably going to be worth staying with for Cranston alone. 

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