How To Get Away With Murder: Season 1 (2014)

Poised somewhere between Scandal and The Secret History, Shonda Rhimes’ spectacular new series sets out her mission statement as never before: to write as if quality television never happened. Where quality television – or “more than television” as HBO terms it – is keen to brand and apologise for itself as a totally separate medium from television, How To Get Away With Murder, like Scandal before it, still has that steadfast swagger that television started to accrue towards the end of the 90s – the swagger that comes from the conviction that nothing and nobody can reach as many people as a primetime slot. Flaunting that for all it’s worth, Viola Davis plays Annalise Keating, a Philadelphia criminal lawyer and academic who takes a group of gifted young interns under her wing, only to fall back upon them when murder finds its way into her practice. Like Kerry Washington, Davis’ performance turns on utterly precipitous lurches between steely attitude and histrionic vulnerability that quickly exceed and exhaust your attention or energy span as a viewer, necessitating a montage sequence of reaction shots for even her minor dramatic moments. Mostly they come from her students - especially her protégé Wes (Alfred Enoch), whose blank, earnest face makes him the perfect receptacle for the series – although they’re all hip, cocky and upwardly mobile as only the 90s knew how to make them. If they were in a slasher film, they’d all be contenders for the first one to get killed, just as they all feel like so many crossover MTV hearthrobs waiting to happen, passing time here before they get that inevitable music deal. Rhimes, after all, was the mastermind behind Britney Spears’ Crossroads, the swansong of 90s teen fandom, and none of her series have indulged those roots as much as this one, to the point where it feels like Davis herself has been given the directive to act as melodramatically adolescent as possible, or to emote as if she’s in a high-rotation music video. In the background of it all, there’s a courtroom drama, murder procedural and something that does in fact often approach the campus slasher films of the 90s, but the sheer level of attitude here doesn’t tend to discriminate much between genres – in fact, it makes you realise how scrupulously quality television has returned to the idea of genre. Nor does it discriminate much between different kinds of pleasure or attachment – for all that it’s been acclaimed for frank gay sex, all the characters irradiate a kind of bisexual bloom, available to the audience in pretty much whatever way you want to take them. Less a nostalgic gesture than a kind of wilful oblivion to the canons of good televisual taste that have emerged in recent years, it’s not even interested in liberating you from your straitlaced viewing lifestyle so much as reminding you that you don't really need to be liberated, that quality television is still television.