First Impressions: How to Get Away with Murder (Netflix)

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 I love courtroom dramas. 

I love non-linear storytelling.

I love thrillers.

I love tender love stories that embellish such series of grit, grime, and blood.

This series delivers on all counts, dips somewhat after a couple of seasons, gets uneven and predictable (when it is less courtroom and more drama) and then finishes strong.

The series centers around Annalise Keating who is a fierce, black criminal lawyer who also teaches a class in criminal law (which she calls 'How to Get Away with Murder'). As a teaching methodology, she gets her class to weigh in on her live cases. Part of her strategy also involves picking a handful of promising students and have them work in her 'lab' where they get to help her in strenuous arguments and civil suits, etc. The plot thickens, a murder happens, people get involved, incriminated, incarcerated, and dead.

I found a couple of characters in this cast to be really unlikeable - Michaela, Laurel, and Bonnie. After the first couple of seasons, the melodrama outweighs the courtroom drama. The cliffhangers become templatized...yet there's something about the sheer immenseness of Annalise that I loved. I was also moved by that tender love story between Connor and Oliver. In the beginning of the series, Connor is a self-serving selfish dazzlingly attractive man. He meets and gets together with Oliver who is steady and regular. They get married and there comes a time when they may be in a st situation. So Connor decides to leave. He says goodbye and tells Ollie, "Thank you. Now I know how to love." Very well done, I thought.

The cases themselves and courtroom sets themselves are rivetting. I wish they had more of those in the middle seasons. But Annalise...the way she traverses the same journey of being top, then being down and out and then soaring again... it's quite masterful. I think with a weaker actor it would have been quite one-note. She gave it heft and nuance.

It's on Netflix. (It was J's recco and it's not often we both like the same thing.)



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