Your Honor

 In the seventh episode of the Showtime original series Your Honor, Judge Michael Desiato comes home to a surprise birthday party.  Desiato has been managing a horrifying personal crisis that has compelled him to perform a number of unethical and, even, criminal acts.  He's on the verge of an emotional collapse, but Desiato, brillliantly played Bryan Cranston, is a skillful liar and, even, more effective at concealing his overwrought emotional state.  And, so, he grins at his new girlfriend, glad-hands with a couple of shady local politicians, and embraces his troubled teenage son, Adam.  Just as the birthday boy is blowing out the candles on his luminous-looking cake, the family's old dog staggers into the gathering and vomits our a porridge of human brains on the floor.  Desiato glares at the pooch who seems to be suitably mortified  (In this show, even the dog acts up a storm.).  You couldn't imagine a worse climax to a party.  Then, episode 7 (named, by the way, "Episode Seven") cuts to black.

In 1797, Immanuel Kant penned a famous essay entitled On a Supposed Right to Lie from Benevolent Motives.  In this memorable text, Kant argues that "The Truth is a  formal duty of man toward each other."  Since lying could never be elevated to an universaL principle, telling lies is always forbidden.  Kant struggles with this outcome, a logical consequence of his work that flows from the so-called "categorical imperative".  One of the problems that he addresses is the so-called "murderer at the door" hypothetical:  someone comes to the door with a loaded pistol and says that if George is at home, he intends to blow out his brains.  Does the person answering the door have to tell the truth that George is cowering somewhere inside the house?  Your Honor demonstrates the consequences of lying when it seems that there is no other course but to prevaricate in order to save someone's life.  Simply put, lies lead to your dog barfing puking brains at your birthday party.  This seems a bit unlikely, but the Showtime crime series makes this outcome seem plausible.

Your Honor is relentlessly grim and depressing.  It is also extraordinarily gripping and suspenseful.  Right now, it's the best series (to my knowledge) on television.  I temper my superlatives because there is great TV being made everywhere right now and, probably, there is some Finnish or Taiwanese series better than Your Honor (a show that is, in fact, based on precursor Israeli Tv program called Kvem) of which I know nothing and may possibly never learn about.  But, among the TV shows that I follow, Your Honor is superior in all respects.  The show presents a series of misfortunes that continue to ramify, an initial lie expanding beyond it initial limits into the community and remorselessly causing all kinds of awful collateral damage.  Some sequences in the show put a knot into your stomach and leave it there.

Within the first ten minutes, Your Honor establishes its nightmarish premise.  A young man named Adam is visiting a squalid neighborhood in New Orleans, apparently the place where his mother may have been murdered a year earlier.  The young man encounters some local hoodlums and has an asthma attack as he is driving his car.  As he reaches for his inhaler, he loses control of the car for a moment and smashes head-on into a motorcyclist.  The kid on the cycle has his skull smashed open and he dies in the gutter.  Adam is too terrified and (literally) short of breath to successfully complete a 911 call that he places.  And, so, he flees the scene of the accident, transforming a moment of carelessness into a felony hit-and-run.  In his panic, he leaves various clues lying around the accident scene that point to his identify.  

Adam is the son of the highly regarded and honorable Judge Desiato.  When Adam tells his father what he has done, the Judge hugs his boy and, then, drive him down to law enforcement to arrange for him to be taken into custody.  So far so good (or bad, depending how you view these things.)  But at the police station, Desiato sees the cops consoling a bereaved family -- these are the parents of the dead motorcyclist, the capo of New Orleans' most brutal and violent mob, Jimmy Baxter, and his wife, who has been driven half-insane by grief.  Desiato has good reason to not sacrifice his son to the mobster and his minions and, so, he devises a scheme to cover-up the killing.  Here is where the Kant's absolute prohibition against lying comes into play.  Desiato loves his son and wants to prevent his inevitable murder at the hands of the Baxter crime family.  So he contacts a ebullient, but, possibly, disreputable wardheeler and arranges for the hit-and-run vehicle to be crushed out of existence.  To accomplish this the wardheeler sends an African-American kid with his own gangster affiliations (he's part of the Desire mob) to steal the car and transport it to the salvage yard for destruction.  But there's institutional racism in New Orleans and the poor kid gets arrested for "driving while Black" or something on that order.  The car is linked to the killing and the Black hoodlum gets framed for the hit-and-run.  This has a series of horrific consequences:  the Baxter mob assumes that the killing is part of a gang war and firebombs the home of the boy incarcerated for stealing the car -- this results in the incineration of the young man's mother and his two little sisters.  Baxter's other son, a vicious criminal himself is at Angola penintentiary.  His mother pulls some strings and arranges for her son to beat to death the Black kid framed for the hit-and-run.  Ultimately, Jimmy Baxter (Michael Stuhlbarg) concludes mistakenly that Judge Desiato is, in fact, the person responsible for the hit-and-run.  From this point, the plot proliferates into various separate narrative strands.  Adam, the actual hit and run driver, is having a covert affair with his High School teacher -- I'm not sure where this leads.  Adam has also met the dead gangster's daughter and seems to be falling in love with her --this is a ridiculous plot twist in some respects, but it's extremely effective.  Jimmy Baxter's wife  (and the dead boy's mother) keeps stirring up havoc -- she makes Lady Macbeth look kind and gentle.  Meanwhile Judge Desiato has embarked on a love affair with his former law clerk, a much younger woman.  There's a public defender (fired from her big time law job because of her interest in defending the poor) who sets out to unravel the mystery.  And the situation is complicated briefly by a blackmailer -- it's his brains brought home in Judge Desiato's pant's cuff that makes the family dog sick at the birthday party.  

All of this is filmed in Cable Tv's best style.  The film making is powerfully realistic (so it seems if you set aside the convoluted Shakespearian plot) and exploits the atmospheric elements of the Big Easy.  The acting is fine on all levels -- Michael Stuhlberg is particularly frightening as the grief-stricken mobster. The dialogue is snappy and memorable.  When the penny-ante blackmailer is killed, Desiato has to clean up the mess -- hence, the brain in his pant's cuff.  He remarks that it is his birthday.  "I think we've gone well beyond irony here," the mobster's cool redhaired Irish assassin says.  "So I guess everyone's a fucking philosopher," Desiato remarks -- I think this earns him a quick, efficient beating.  The camera style is "invisible" in the sense that the narrative and acting is central to the enterprise, not the hyper-realistic visuals.. The show doesn't indulge in showy arias or music videos -- everything moves along at an efficient and brisk clip.  The show depends, of course, on Bryan Cranston -- there's something suspicious about how quickly and blithely he takes to lying.  It's, as if, improvising outrageous lies is a particular skill that he develops with lightning rapidity, as if he were born to this sort of conniving. But Cranston's character is also horrified at the result of his lies and, at times, we see his face contorted into a grimacing mask that look exactly the mask of tragedy adorning theaters in the good old days.  Cranston isn't afraid to show us the Judge's abject panic and his willingness to compromise all of his principles in order to save his son, an endeavor that seems to be doomed from the start.  

(I'm only halfway through the series, a program that has to be watched the old-fashioned way -- that is, one episode every week.  The next couple nights will be the most perilous for the program -- generally shows of this intensity flag substantially as filler is plowed into the narrative to delay the action until a return to form in the last several episodes.  We will have to see how things work out.  A young Black boy whose family has been killed by Baxter -- as a result of Desiato's lies -- is lurking about the edges of the action and I suspect he will assume importance as a kind of "spoiler" in the last act of this drama.)