With that revelation, a binary choice is forced on Michael and all interesting narrative avenues are blocked. A confession by Adam would be a death warrant. He marches straight out again, however, when he realises that the boy Adam killed was Rocco Baxter – the son of a local mafia boss, Jimmy (Michael Stuhlbarg). What would you do if you came home from another day of fighting systemic injustice to find your son has committed a hit-and-run? At first, the father does as you would expect – calls a lawyer, prepares his son for interview as best he can and takes him down to the police station. He is a Good Guy, you see? Do you see? Do you? The Dr Kildare of Louisiana. He has secretly investigated the officer’s claims against a black single mother and knows the cop to be a lying racist. We first meet Michael as he destroys a police witness in court. Style-wise, things fall off a cliff thereafter. Panic-stricken, he watches the boy die and, after an abortive attempt to call an ambulance, flees the scene. I haven’t felt so tense since 1994, when Christopher Eccleston dragged himself out of a house and into the street, bleeding his last, in Cracker.ĭesiato’s asthmatic 17-year-old son, Adam, is scrambling for his inhaler as he is being pursued through a sketchy neighbourhood by apparent gang members when his vehicle collides with Rocco, another 17-year-old, on a motorbike.

That said, it begins with a breathtakingly suspenseful and harrowing car accident and a drawn-out death scene. Your Honor is scrubbed clean of all that. Every moment of its 62 episodes was played with astonishing emotional and psychological acuity and embedded within a cracking story that bent you to its will at every turn, leaving you devastated by the end.

It was the story of a good man uncovering dark truths about himself and his capacity for compromise and corruption under pressure. He is played by Bryan Cranston, whom you might remember played Walter White in a little thing called Breaking Bad. The man is Michael Desiato, a judge in New Orleans. It is the story of a good man uncovering dark truths about himself and his capacity for compromise and corruption under pressure. This is the besetting problem with Your Honor (Sky Atlantic), a US adaptation of the Israeli series Kvodo. The chance of reminding yourself and viewers how good you had it is correspondingly high.

The chance of lightning striking twice is infinitesimal. If you struck gold in The Sopranos, don’t take any of the mobster roles you are offered thereafter. If you have been in The Wire, don’t do another cop show. The same principle – as actors, commissioners and agents ought to know – applies to TV hits.

What is the only rule when you have had a great one-night stand? That’s right – don’t go back.

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