How To Get Away With Murder

Netflix inertia (noun): To be unable to decide which boxset to start next, despite trawling through the various menus, watching all the trailers and soliciting friends’ recommendations.  Typically occurs during withdrawal from finishing a previous boxset.  Often leads to entire allocated boxset time being used up in failing to pick a new one, resulting in disappointment.

Picture the scene: I had just finished all of Teen Wolf (I know) and didn’t know what to start next.  Rather than risk the above condition, I made an impulse choice, basing it on some billboards I had seen in LA in 2014 and not much else.  I really wasn’t thinking.  Courtroom dramas have never really appealed as they just seem to be people shouting objection and judges banging gavels, all while my limited knowledge of the UK or US judicial system prevents me from really caring what’s going on.

But the premise of How To Get Away With Murder is sexier than that.  This is because the whole show is sexier than your average drama.  That doesn’t mean it’s all private parts and naughty swears.  It’s soap operatic in its approach to the (many) sex scenes: the bra always stays on, the covers are mostly up, or the camera doesn’t go below the waist (I really have checked carefully).  This isn’t Game Of Thrones with willies and boobs flapping about everywhere.  Although I could take some coarser language.  The biggest cuss you will hear is “You ungrateful little twit.”

Nevertheless, the tameness stops there.  The rest is pure wildness.  If your job is helping accused murderers avoid jail, whatever it takes, then, when you end up embroiled in a homicide yourself, you’re well placee to get off scot free.  And so we enter the world of Annalise Keating, defence attorney at large.  She’s also a college professor teaching criminal law.  She seems to have time to take clients’ cases and to teach classes, and all of this seems to happen somehow in the home she lives in, which is also a 24-hour office solution for her employees and interns.  I think I would feel weird knowing my boss sleeps upstairs.

Keating is so hard she eats her own shit, particularly in early episodes before the layers of her personality have been peeled back.  You know she eats her own shit as she permanently has an expression on her as if she’s looking for somewhere to be sick, which is an understandable consequence of such behaviour.  But this doesn’t do justice to Viola Davis’ masterful performance.  Keating is horrible, but it doesn’t take long till you’re unable to stop yourself from rooting for her.  Talking of pained faces, accompanying Keating’s sick face, we have Bonnie Longbottom, her long-suffering number two (as it were), who mopes about looking like she has just smelled a fart the whole time.  I’m glad I didn’t go into law.

These grown-ups, along with Frank the paralegal (who mostly is having an even worse time), are joined by five interns fresh from Keating’s new intake of students at Middleton University.  It’s easy to see them as a box tick in stock characters, but they really do come to life in their own right as the show progresses.  Their illustrious internships are maintained by working all hours supporting Keating with her various cases.  In this sense, How To Get Away With Murder is slightly episodic, taking on a new defendant, through to trial, with each instalment, giving the interns the chance to fight for Keating’s affections in the process.  But each series is structured around more gruesome body disposal, with our beloved lead characters caught up in their own stabby stabby slashy slashy.

These are foreshadowed with various flash forwards and flashbacks which don’t always hang together that well, but each series in itself is neatly resolved around all the big reveals.  And that is its power.  As always, first episodes get you well and truly sold in, but the mysteries pile up and up until you can’t resist one more instalment.  Before long, the various lies and secrets weave all the characters together to such an extent that nobody can trust anyone and even we as viewers lose all sight of the truth.

Everyone has something on everyone else, but somehow the interns’ friendships spring from hate, resulting in cracking crackling dialogue as they goad one another.  And back to the sex: almost everyone sleeps with everyone else.  Who’d have thought spending all hours at your professor’s house sifting through legal case files for no money would be so arousing?

Either way, there are two other things that make this show pure fantasy.  All the characters constantly answer their mobile phones.  They should learn by at least episode three that this only leads to bad things.  I stopped answering my phone at work in 2013.  Secondly, Keating’s kids are helped by policeman Nate Lahey in their legally ambiguous endeavours.  His top seems to fall off all the time and he is so chiselled that it must pain him to breathe as much as it pains me to shove too much cheese in my face while watching.  I won’t mention the plotline laziness where one character is simply able to hack things left, right and centre to help with their cases.

So it might not be perfect, but this holds the record of probably causing me the most audible gasps while watching.  Next time your thumb is hovering on the remote and you can’t quite commit to that next boxset to binge, try some US crime glamour (with bras on) and plump for this one.