A legal drama with plenty of soapy intrigue, “Reasonable Doubt” on Hulu stars Emayatzy Corinealdi as Jax Stewart, a glamorous Los Angeles attorney to the rich and powerful. At work? She’s on point. At home? Well, things are considerably messier.
Shonda Rhimes didn’t invent this formula, but she perfected it — notably with shows like “Scandal” and “How to Get Away with Murder” — proving there’s a sizable TV audience looking for complicated portrayals of Black women as antiheroes: Super-accomplished in public, frequently guided by callous self-interest and armed with a piercing assessment of reality. But in private, they can be revealingly vulnerable and sometimes completely broken. They may behave badly — it’s how they’ve chosen to move through a world forever looking to cut them off at the knees — but they are not without a conscience. The dichotomy is what makes them so compelling as characters.
“Reasonable Doubt” creator Raamla Mohamed is a “Scandal” alum and she takes the Rhimes template and improves upon it by (mostly) keeping the narrative from spiraling off into the kind of shock value melodrama that can raise the stakes but tends to undermine good storytelling. “Scandal” star Kerry Washington is also on board as an executive producer and she directs the first episode. (Larry Wilmore is a producer here as well.)
