As it begins a second season that wasn’t originally in the cards, Your Honor looks like a victim of its own success, picking up on a story that had already concluded because it was a huge hit for Showtime. The first season was a flawed but gripping potboiler built around a New Orleans judge who risks his career and his soul to protect his teenage son after a hit-and-run accident. The ending was a bit untidy from a plotting standpoint, but it did have the power of a classic tragedy: For all the scheming and selling out Michael Desiato (Bryan Cranston) had to do to keep gangsters from killing his boy Adam, the young man ended up dead anyway, caught by a stray bullet that wasn’t meant for him. Fate can be cruelly ironic that way.
The big question — one that this first episode doesn’t answer adequately — is what, after all that’s happened, is Your Honor about? That title once meant something. It was about an upstanding judge (who is now not a judge) who compromised his integrity, and the universe punished him for it. What made the show fundamentally compelling in that first season is that it put us in Michael’s shoes for every gut-wrenching decision, so when he rigs a trial to get the psychotic son of a gangster off an open-and-shut murder rap, we can follow the logic. At a certain point, having to choose the least-bad of terrible options over and over again leads him down the path to irredeemable dishonor. Leaving him with nothing is how traditional tragedies like this one end.
But viewers really loved Your Honor, which set the stage for this second — and, according to Cranston, final — season. With season one writer Joey Hartstone taking over as showrunner for Peter Moffat, the new season busily works to pick up the pieces as best it can. And to Hartstone’s credit, the show’s narrative engine revs up quickly. Picking up almost soon after the first season left off — or at least as soon it took Cranston to grow the sort of scraggly beard that he had toward the end of Breaking Bad — “Part Eleven†brings all the major characters back (except Adam), along with all their lingering beefs and traumas. Adam’s death may have closed out Michael’s piece of the narrative, but it made everyone else’s lives messier.
To recap briefly, Adam was shot by Eugene (Benjamin Flores Jr.), who had intended to take revenge on the Baxters, led by kingpin Jimmy (Michael Stuhlbarg), for killing his entire family — first his older brother Kofi, who the hot-tempered Carlo Baxter (Jimi Stanton) murdered in prison after Kofi took the fall for Adam’s hit-and-run, and then his mother and other siblings, who died in a gas explosion. Eugene missing the target doesn’t take the heat off him one bit: The Baxters want him dead at the first opportunity and the Desire gang of the Lower Ninth Ward, led by “Big Mo†(Andrene Ward-Hammond), aren’t happy with him, either, since it stokes preexisting tensions between Desire and the Baxters. Big Mo had been protecting Eugene, but now the situation is more complicated.
As for poor Michael, he has nothing to live for. His son is dead. He has been imprisoned and disbarred for his actions. And he’s in such a pit of despair that he’s refusing to eat, even when the alternative is being force-fed a nutritional supplement through a tube down his throat. In the episode’s wildest sequence, he volunteers to participate in a prison rodeo where he and three other inmates play “convict poker,†a game where they sit around a table playing cards, and a bull is released to try to knock them out of their chairs. The last inmate not to get gored or run away wins a few hundred bucks, but Michael isn’t there for the prize. He’s there for the horns. (Believe it or not, this barbaric event is real at the Angela Prison Rodeo in Louisiana.)
Perhaps peace will elude Michael forever, but a measure of redemption is possible. The excellent Rosie Perez, new to the cast, appears as Olivia Delmont, a U.S. Attorney who’s so eager to bring down the Baxter crime family that she’s willing to expunge Michael’s taped confession if he cooperates with her investigation. In the end, that’s enough to convince him to try life on the outside, but it’s going to put him back in the crossfire again and potentially imperil the friends he betrayed. Friends like Mayor Charlie Figaro (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), who did Michael the “favor†of obstruction justice, and Nancy Costello (Amy Landecker), a police detective who is still reeling from everything that’s happened under her nose. There’s more than enough fallout from season one to fill ten episodes, especially if that’s as far as Your Honor will go.
The Eugene situation gets most of the heat in this first hour, which suggests that Your Honor has morphed into a more egalitarian ensemble piece than a thriller with Michael at the center. The Baxters want Eugene dead, especially Gina (Hope Davis), who amps up her Lady Macbeth tendencies so much that she goads Carlo into an ill-advised execution attempt on Desire turf and lambasts her husband for not caring enough. On the other side of this gangster standoff, Big Mo isn’t happy that Eugene has gotten Desire into this feud, but she isn’t about to let Carlo plow into her territory without taking action. The two end up making an arrangement: Mo won’t kill Carlo if Jimmy leaves Eugene alone. That’s a tenuous truce at best.
In perhaps the most intriguing development so far, it turns out that Michael is a grandfather. Before Adam kicked the bucket, he apparently got Baxter’s daughter, Sofia (Lilli Kay), pregnant. Now she’s starting to ask questions about her own family that she wasn’t willing to pose. Her brother Carlo is a born thug, but Jimmy and Gina have done their best to shield Fia from Baxter’s true business, not unlike Sofia Coppola’s character in The Godfather Part III. (Hence the name “Sofia,†or is that just a coincidence?) But she’s not an idiot, and she goes so far here as to visit Michael in prison to ask if his son really loved her. A shared grandchild certainly changes the dynamic between Michael and the Baxters, and Sofia’s growing consciousness about her gangster family suggests a major realignment. None of this drama may be as thematically purposeful as the first season, but it’ll be lively.
Beignets
• Seeing the “Previously On†segment before the start of this second season is a reminder of just how bugnuts the first season got. Many shows would have stopped with just the moral dilemma of a judge helping his son get out of a hit-and-run accident. But Your Honor was just clearing its throat.
• “Young men are impulsive.†Big Mo uses that phrase twice — once about Eugene, and again about Carlo. The parallels are drawn up neatly between the two young men, whose common sin is committing violence without consulting the grown-ups first. Let the adults do the murdering, kids.
• Hope Davis continues to make a five-course meal out of Gina, whose Oedipal relationship with Carlo seems considerably more intimate than her marriage to Jimmy.
This recent spasm of violence imperils Charlie’s mayoral reelection, but he still has the larger specter of his “favor†for Michael hanging over him. If anyone important finds out that he arranged for Kofi Jones to take care of Adam’s car — a cover-up that resulted in many deaths, starting with Kofi’s — then his career and his freedom are at risk.
• The director credit here goes to Peter Sollett, who started his career with the very promising indie film Raising Victor Vargas and the cute studio rom-com Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist but has pivoted more recently to TV gigs, including episodes of The Path and Evil.
• From that Guardian article on the Angola Prison Rodeo: The person who stays at the table longest in “convict poker†gets $250, but inmates can earn double that if they participate in “guts and glory,†where the winner has to pluck a poker chip from the horn of a charging bull. There’s apparently a waiting list for inmates willing to risk their necks for this relative pittance.