‘Presumed Innocent’ Episode 2 Recap: Prime Suspect

Well, this is turning out to be more interesting than it needed to be! Just two episodes in, and Presumed Innocent has revealed itself to be a lot of things at once. Happily, to borrow video game technology, the buffs stack rather than canceling each other out. Rather than feeling scattered or overambitious, the result is rich.

Of course, it’s a legal thriller first and foremost. This episode centers on Rusty Sabitch’s dawning realization that not only is he a suspect in the murder of his pregnant lover and colleague, Carolyn Pohlemus, he is in fact the sole suspect. As his lies come out — he’d never told his best friend and boss Raymond Horgan that he was involved with Carolyn and thus tainting the investigation by taking it on, he’d never told his wife Barbara that the supposedly over affair rekindled for the week-long fling that led to the pregnancy — he admits he’s all but welcomed this fate. He was obsessed with Carolyn, he admits, and when the cops go through his phone and computer they’ll find enough to amount to stalking. 

“It’s not if I’ll be arrested — I will be arrested,” he tells Barbara and his therapist (to whom he’d also been lying; his insistence that he may have lied but “I’m not a liar” is darkly funny.) “If I were the prosecutor, I wouldn’t fucking hesitate. And this being Tommy Molto? There’s no ‘if.’”

Because that’s another aspect of the show: The cringe-comedy levels of vicious acrimony surging between Horgan and Rusty on one side and their replacements, Nico Della Guardia and Tommy Molto on the other. i truly can’t say enough good things about the dynamic between these four men, who for all intents and purposes could be characters in an existentialist drama sentenced to endure one another for eternity, or until retirement, whichever comes first.

O-T Fagbenle in particular is a riot as “Delay” Guardia. His slightly under-enunciated speech comes out like a purr from a cat you just know is going to knock your full drink over onto your laptop the second you turn away. But even he’s a bit shocked by the way his underling Tommy — “Thing 2” to Della Guardia’s “Thing 1,” as Horgan profanely puts it in court — seems intent on pinning the crime on Rusty. You can immediately tell why Nico, the younger guy, is the brains of this outfit. He’s a vindictive dick, to be sure, but he’s not a slave to his own emotions about it the way Tommy is. You just know that if things go south, he’ll have more of a chance at escaping unscathed than a blinkered thinker like Tommy will.

This is as good a place as any to shout out the hilarious work of James Hiroyuki Liao as the psychotically angry and assholish medical examiner, whom Rusty discovers basically sat on potentially exculpatory evidence of additional semen in the case connected to Carolyn’s murder out of laziness and distaste for Rusty personally. I’ve loved the archetype of “guy who hates the main character out of the blue” ever since I saw the cab driver blow up at the Dude for disliking the Eagles in The Big Lebowski, so this guy has my full support.

This is also the right point to mention that at the end of the episode, Rusty receives an anonymous text reading “YOU WERE THERE. I SAW YOU.” So maybe he shouldn’t be presumed fully innocent just yet.

There’s domestic drama at work here as well, naturally. Adding to the show’s already stacked roster of welcome faces, Elizabeth Marvel turns up as Lorraine, Horgan’s wife, who quite justifiably thinks less of Rusty for involving her husband in this mess, and less of her husband for not wising up to it sooner and thus allowing her to get involved in this mess. As Barbara, Ruth Negga uses a light touch in responding to Rusty’s additional revelations and Tommy’s legal depradations. She looks haggard but calm (perhaps assisted by weed) throughout. Her most memorable sequence this episode comes when she first ambushes Rusty at dinner and forces him to come clean to the kids, then tells them privately that their dad is a good man whom she believes was really in love with this woman. That’s a hell of a thing to say in defense of the man who cheated on you, and Rusty cries overhearing it.

There’s one more aspect that really needs mentioning: Presumed Innocent is, in part, a tone poem about the power of sex. That’s the thing that Rusty keeps thinking of, that’s what keeps drawing him back to Carolyn. There are a few memories of other times sprinkled in now and there, but just barely. When his thoughts turn to her, they’re naked, sweating, pinning each other down, fucking each other’s brains out. Or they’re languid, post-coital, reveling in the pleasure they’ve experienced. Or she’s trying to break up with him and instead fucking him fully dressed on the floor of an office. 

As Decider’s own Nicole Gallucci points out, this show needs this material. Personally I’m all for sex of all kinds on TV, “essential” or “inessential” to the plot. (Pop quiz: Was the last sex you had essential to your plot, and if not, would you prefer to have skipped it?) But in this case it is absolutely essential, since only the intensity of their sexual connection can explain why Rusty has behaved in the way that he has, why he didn’t break things off cleanly, why he may get pinned with her murder in the end. Sex is the great, and sometimes not-so-great, motivator, and Presumed Innocent is laying its evidence out for all to see.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.