Presumed Innocent · Season 1 · Episode 1 · 12 June 2024
S1E1 The Burden of Proof
THE MOMENT Rusty's first courtroom moment after the arrest - the specific humiliation of a prosecutor's professional identity colliding with the system he has spent his career inside, now turned against him.
Presumed Innocent's Apple TV+ premiere updates Scott Turow's 1987 novel for the streaming era with Jake Gyllenhaal as Rusty Sabich, a prominent Chicago prosecutor accused of murdering his colleague Carolyn Polhemus with whom he has had an affair. The episode establishes the show's register - prestige procedural with genuine character complexity - and Gyllenhaal's performance as a man whose guilt...
Full episode analysis below. Spoiler-light verdict above.
Updated
Presumed Innocent's premiere earns its 78% Rotten Tomatoes score through the intelligence of its central casting. Jake Gyllenhaal's Rusty Sabich is the kind of role that requires the actor to hold guilty and innocent simultaneously in every scene - guilty of the affair, possibly guilty of more, certainly not innocent in the moral sense even if innocent legally. Apple TV+'s eight-episode adaptation gives Turow's novel the space the miniseries format allows, and the premiere deploys that space to establish Rusty's professional world and his marriage (Ruth Negga's Barbara) with enough specificity that the investigation feels personal rather than procedural. A confident legal thriller premiere that earns its update of classic material.