Streaming on Apple TV - Excellent crime adaptations - PRESUMED INNOCENT, BAD MONKEY, LADY IN THE LAKE

Adaptations are flowing thick and fast from Apple TV. For producers and editors commissioning stuff for TV's voracious appetite, there’s always some safety in knowing that the source material comes with a stamp of quality. Famous authors too. Scott Turow, Carl Hiaasen and Laura Lippmann. I haven’t read any of the latter but the adaptation of her 2022 book Lady in the Lake is the best thing I’ve seen of its kind all year. The series showrunner and director is Alma Ha’rel 

It’s Baltimore 1966 with a dip back to the late forties. Two minorities are the primary focus – the Jewish community of suburban Pikesville and the black community. The former is disturbed by the abduction of ten year old Tessie Durst and the subsequent hunt for her killer. Particularly disturbed is Maddie (Natalie Portman), a middle-aged woman who, we learn was once the girlfriend of the father of the murdered child. The relationship was frowned upon and went nowhere and Maddie  Morgenstern married Milton Schwartz, a much less interesting and far more orthodox man. Tessie’s disappearance triggers enormous changes in Maddie – she departs abruptly from home, her son is permanently antagonistic and she embarks on an attempt first to do a little insurance fraud and then to get into newspaper reporting. Along the way she starts fucking a black cop.

 

Across town Cleo Sherwood (Moses Ingram) is trying to eke out a living as window mannequin at Hecht’s department store and as barmaid hostess at a black nightclub run by Shell Gordon, the black rackets king of Baltimore and a man to be feared. Cleo has an ambition to get into politics via a job on the staff of prominent local Congresswoman  Myrtle Summer and is also trying to keep her son out of harm’s way as he embarks on a life of petty crime as a numbers collector. The collision of the two societies, separated mostly by a cynical police force and an even more cynical newspaper reporter makes for great drama. The ending must be as bleak as any in recent times.

 

Presumed Innocent is based on a book by Scott Turow, a Chicago lawyer, written in 1987  and filmed by Alan J Pakula back in 1990. I remember that Scott Murray drew my attention to the book and for quite some time I was a devotee of Turow’s very precise, slow boil legal/political/crime stories that peered into the politics and corruption of the fictional Kindle County, a part of the larger area dubbed I think the Tri-Cities. But we know it was really Turow’s Chicago. In a Balzacian fashion, characters bobbed up across the series of books from Presumed Innocent in 1987 to Reversible Errors in 2002. Cant say I’ve read any since. 

 

The new series (showrunner is the amazingly prolific David E Kelley), a long eight parts, starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Prosecutor Rusty Sabich, brings the story into the present. Back in 1987 there were no mobile phones and little CCTV to move the story along in the way that the new series does. It was complicated back then and the update piles on the clues that suggest at every step that we should have a sneaking feeling that Rusty may well have murdered his mistress. As far as I could see it doesn’t layout any clues as to who we finally learn did do it so the twist is a bit mediocre.

 

Bad Monkey benefits from taking its time. Carl Hiaasen is a great humourist, a great satirist but above all a writer with an implacable ability to open up the rotten can of worms that is Florida’s politics and law enforcement. The one previous attempt at making a movie of his books (at least his so-called ‘Adult Fiction”) was the stupendously mediocre Striptease way back in 1996. The TV series  (showrunner Bill Lawrence) tries to capture Hiaasen’s jocularity first via Vince Vaughan’s one man running standup dialogue as Andrew Yancy, a cop who has been tossed off the force then reinstated as a food inspector. It adds to it by possibly outright pillaging or by attempting to copy Hiaasen’s prose via a commentary track where a minor character far too frequently seeks to add a little humour by pointing out what is otherwise mostly the bleeding obvious. Still it does get Hiaasen’s focus – Florida corruption, pathetic police force, the sheer indolence of so many of the inhabitants and the tendency for many to take whatever criminal possibility is on offer. That gets a bravo. More Hiaasen please. 

 

In fact more adaptations of all three writers.  Done as well as they were done here would be just the ticket in between seasons of Slow Horses.