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David E. Kelley Deep Dives Into The 'Quiet, Cognitive Oppression' Of ‘Presumed Innocent,' His Knack For Adapting Books & Telling Stories From The Heart
On a humid Friday afternoon in Austin, Texas, an audience is treated to the first episode of Presumed Innocent before creator David E. Kelley is bestowed with ATX TV Festival's inaugural Showrunner Award. Backstage, Kelley is also watching the episode for the first time in quite a while.
'I usually don't go back and watch things after they're all done…but we're really proud of this one, so it's not painful,' he jokes.
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Revisiting his work isn't something he's 'philosophically opposed to' or even necessarily actively avoiding, per se, he adds.
'It's not something I do. I feel like one day I will,' he tells Deadline, sitting down for an interview ahead of his award ceremony. 'I've not seen an episode of Ally McBeal or Picket Fences in 20 years…So, I'll probably forget the plots and then I can enjoy them like a new viewer.'
Of course, Presumed Innocent is still pretty fresh on his mind. Season 1, which premiered one year ago on Apple TV+, is based on Scott Turow's novel of the same name and follows the criminal case against Chicago prosecutor Rusty Sabich (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) charged with murdering a colleague, and the nightmare at home that the murder trial visits on the family of the accused.
Kelley is currently developing a second season of the series, which will be an anthology. Season 2 will not follow any of the characters from the first season and will instead adapt Jo Murray's upcoming legal thriller Dissection of a Murder.
Presumed Innocent was initially planned as a limited series with no intentions of continuing beyond the first season, Kelley says.
'I think that the genesis of it first came from Apple [asking], 'Have we got another one in us?' And we didn't, for these characters,' he explained. 'But the themes of Presumed Innocent, the psychological thriller, the elements of infidelity and betrayal, that's timeless. So we thought maybe there's other IP that we can mine the same terrain, so people can feel they're coming to the same series, but with different storytellers. We thought, if we find the right material, we will do it, and if we don't, we won't.'
Ultimately, a few different contenders emerged, including another book by Turow. 'We chose Dissection of a Murder for year two. But in success, it could go on beyond that,' adds Kelley.
Turow has built out a bit of a universe within his novels, revisiting Rusty several times and also writing stories around other ancillary characters from Presumed Innocent. Upon learning Kelley had weighed another one of Turow's novels for Season 2, I ask if he'll consider revisiting any of those characters himself in future seasons or aims keep it a true anthology.
'We did talk about that,' he confirmed. 'My fear in doing it without Rusty is that it would feel like a subset of the whole. Jake was pretty extraordinary in Season 1. He is the face of the series. So to come back with the same ensemble and not have him be part of it, I think that it would just feel a little bit less than. So we thought better to start with a new blank page.'
Kelley never really thought he'd enjoy adapting novels. That is, until he brought Liane Moriarty's best-seller Big Little Lies to the small screen for HBO.
'Breaking [a story] is hard, hard work, and the fuel for it is often the idea. When that idea comes pre-baked or the story is already broken, you haven't got the adrenaline to supply the fuel for the writing process,' he said. 'So I thought, 'That's like being a carpenter and not getting to be the architect. I'm not sure I will like it.' But turns out, I really did.'
Generally, he explains, he is most responsive to works with strong character development, but he also very much values 'the opportunity to take departures from the original IP.'
Kelley has become known for adding unexpected twists to well known literary source material, and Presumed Innocent is no exception. An attorney by trade, Kelley surprised fans of the book by revealing an entirely different killer at the end of the eight-episode series.
'The job is never easy, whether it's original writing or adaptation. It's hard finding good stories and finding good story twists, so you're always a bit daunted coming into any project,' he said. Maybe less so with Presumed, because the architecture was so tight in that book, that probably provided me with more comfort than less, because I knew it worked. I knew it worked on the page of the book. I saw it work in the movie. Maybe the anxiety, if any, on Presumed was I don't want to be the one who screws it up.'
In the novel, Rusty's wife Barbara murders his colleague Carolyn Polhemus in a jealous rage after learning Carolyn and Rusty were having an affair. Spoiler alert, for anyone who hasn't seen the series yet, but the finale of the series instead reveals that Rusty and Barbara's daughter Jaden killed Carolyn — and Rusty, having found Carolyn's body shortly after and assuming his family was involved, ties her up like a prior victim on a case that Carolyn tried to divert suspicions.
Kelley says he didn't necessarily intend to rewrite the ending when he began adapting Presumed Innocent.
'I was open to changing the ending, and it was one of the possibilities, because we knew we had to be different from the book…Probably by [Episode] 3, I decided that it would be Jaden,' Kelley tells Deadline. 'I wanted to be true to the themes of the book.'
One thing he did know was that he wanted Barbara, played by Ruth Negga, to have a larger presence in the series than she does in the book. That set up nicely for either her eventual reveal as the murderer, or a convincing red herring to allow Kelley to surprise audiences, should he choose to shake things up.
'If she was going to be the killer, we had to figure out why, and it had to be a little bit more than jealousy. So we really started developing a pathology for her, that she was a guardian of that family, almost in a dangerous kind of way. Once we started mining Barbara's character that way, we quickly tumbled to the idea that we could do that with Jaden as well, and drawing those same personality traits, it would justify her being the killer as well as Barbara,' he explained. 'So we actually gave a few lines to Barbara early on [like], 'I will protect this family at any cost' to set up the idea that it could be her. But we gave Jaden that same DNA so it would be credible when we revealed it to be her.'
All too quickly, the Presumed Innocent premiere is nearing its end. In a few moments, Kelley will step on stage to receive his award and discuss his lengthy and illustrious television career, which spans nearly four decades and includes the likes of L.A. Law, Doogie Howser, M.D., Ally McBeal, The Practice, Big Little Lies, The Lincoln Lawyer, and Nine Perfect Strangers.
But first, he smirks as he watches Gyllenhaal go toe-to-toe with Peter Sarsgaard's Tommy Molto in the final moments of the episode, when Rusty is confronted about his affair with Carolyn, much to the surprise of the former district attorney Raymond Horgan (played by Bill Camp), who is now defending him.
'It's such a delicious scene, because this story's going on in all their faces. Raymond is hearing this stuff for the first time and trying to keep a poker face. The nuance of that scene, where Bill has to play a scene and convey that he's learning information that he hadn't heard before, but he's not playing it for the other actors in the scene. That's tricky acting,' Kelley muses. 'And Peter with Molto, it's like he doesn't want this moment to end. He has taken such shit from Rusty for so long, and now he's got the upper hand. It's like a meal. He doesn't want to wolf down. He just wants to savor it. That's what he's doing here.'
As for Gyllenhaal's display of Rusty's emotional turmoil, he adds, 'you can feel his insides churning as the walls are are closing in.'
'It's not a traditional cliffhanger type scene. There's no action sequence. No one's chasing anyone with a car or firing a bullet. This is all very quiet, cognitive oppression going on here,' Kelley explains.
The episode ends with a bombshell revelation that Carolyn was pregnant when she died, planting the ultimate seed of doubt regarding Rusty's innocence. It's got all the hallmarks of Kelley's signature style, leaving the audience with just enough intrigue to lure them to the next episode — a skill he will exercise again and again over the course of each of the remaining eight episodes.
Before he accepts his award, I have one final question for him. What piece of advice would he give himself, if he could go back in time to his first days as a television writer?
'That's a hard one, but I probably would've gave the same piece of advice that Stephen Bochco gave me when I first walked through his door and it's just start writing from here [points to his heart],' he said. 'You certainly got to think and be smart and pay attention to storytelling, but don't ever forget that it should come from here.'
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