What would you do if you suspected your teenager was a deadly threat to the students and staff at his school? Would you take the law into your own hands if your young daughter was sexually assaulted and the assailant hadn't been apprehended yet? What if a newborn's parents appeared unfit — would you be justified in kidnapping the baby?
These questions and more are posed in Fox's episodic anthology "Accused," an anticipated addition to television's plethora of courtroom dramas and crime stories true and false. The hourlong series, which is more crime than courtroom, features an all-star cast and an impressive list of names among its directors. But it's not enough to help "Accused" overcome a number of obstacles, just one of which is the confining nature of the show's central structure. Each stand-alone installment focuses on one protagonist as they await their verdict in court. Then, in a series of flashbacks, it revisits the events that led up to their arrest and trial, and looks at the butterfly effect their crime has had on the people around them. As the narrative unfolds, the viewer is meant to ponder whether the main character is guilty, innocent or justified in their actions.
But there's a fundamental problem in trying to tackle topical, complex questions, rooted in moral and ethical ambiguities, within a format that calls for brevity. There's simply not enough time here to unpack the individual stories, so much of "Accused" feels underexplored, even outright rushed. Tales that call for nuance instead rely on shorthand to quickly construct a narrative. For example, a music producer and new father is devastated upon learning that his baby is hearing-impaired in "Ava's Story." How do we know this? Because he refers to abortion as a missed opportunity, refuses to hold the baby and says he wants her to hear what he hears. But there isn't the time or space to convincingly establish him as a conflicted soul or a threat to the child, so the ensuing drama around the infant doesn't have the impact that it should. Shallow wading near deep water is a recurring problem throughout the series, resulting in an unsatisfying drama that doesn't do much to advance or degrade the well-worn genres it borrows from.
