It’s a long time since productions like The Forsyte Saga (1967), the 1970s Le Carré adaptations starring Alec Guinness, and the first Shogun (1980) established the now widely-accepted truth that, with few exceptions, the multi-part series is a more suitable format for novel adaptations than a movie – there’s simply more going on in any book of reasonable length than there’s space for in a feature film.

This is largely a matter of arithmetic – a wide-margined page of formatted screenplay runs about a minute, which means that a two-hour movie made from a novel is necessarily a sort of Cliff’s Notes version. (A visual medium can do settings and descriptions very quickly; still, there must be action, dialogue, and people thinking about things, and those take time.)

A series can have as long as it needs to establish a richly textured fictional world and unfold a nuanced story, and the best limited series made from novels deliver an experience that resembles reading the book – the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and this year’s splendid Shogun remake (on Hulu) are such triumphs of intelligent adaptation.

So news of an eight-part series made from Scott Turow’s crackling 1987 legal thriller Presumed Innocent (Apple TV+) was exciting to the many fans of the novel and of the fine 1990 Alan J. Pakula movie version. Pakula’s film closely followed the book’s main storyline, crisply rendering its ingenious storytelling and underlying seriousness, but when it premiered many readers complained that it didn’t have space for novel’s vivid minor characters, legal twists and turns, or the hero/narrator’s ruminations on Cook County’s richly corrupt justice system – Turow’s native habitat during his years as a U.S. attorney in Chicago. A roomier adaptation also offered a chance to explore the meta-mystery of how we dependably fail to notice the narrative sleight-of-hand that enables the story’s final reveal. 

Ha. And ha. The first two episodes of the series created for television by David E. Kelly (L.A. Law, The Practice, Big Little Lies) are a wrong-headed, padded-feeling mess with no interest in finer points. (More installments will be posted weekly. Watch if you dare.)

This is not just a matter of the writing, direction, and casting – although all are problematic; worse, Kelly wantonly alters basic elements upon which the dark, elegant plot depends.

Our hero Rusty Sabich’s wife Barbara – a central character, not a bland female helpmeet – is here not a frustrated graduate student (played by a simmering and inscrutable Bonnie Bedelia) but an annoyed yet apparently comfy stay-at-home mom (Ruth Negga) with nothing better to do on camera than cuddle her two sulky teenagers and play with their hair. The couple’s adored school-aged son has, for soap-operatic reasons, morphed and mitotically divided into the said aggrieved teens.

The femme fatale prosecutor who seduced and dumped Rusty before being murdered is not the exquisite, knowing Greta Scacchi in heels and pencil skirts, but Renate Reinsve in boxy two-pieces, a chopped-off pageboy and no apparent makeup. (In the 30-plus years since the movie was made, women who deploy their sexuality to get what they want have, of course, disappeared from the face of the earth.)

The critical issue of the book’s emphatically not-pregnant murder victim’s birth control method – upon which much courtroom drama and the identity of the murderer turns – is out the window before the end of Episode Two since in the show (drumroll!) SHE WAS PREGNANT! BY OUR HERO!!! Ooh la friggin la.

What, you have to wonder, was Kelly thinking? The novel’s plot is a finely judged mechanism, and rejiggering it to include every current detective-show trope turns the thing unrecognizable.

Allow me to go on about the casting. In the movie, the sheer pleasure of watching Harrison Ford, Bedelia, and Scacchi in the main roles – not to mention, dear God, Raul Julia as Rusty’s lawyer – is necessary sweetening in a bitter tale of crime and punishment. Kelly allows us no such pleasures. Always-boyish Jake Gyllenhaall is radically wrong for our narrator-hero – with his light tenor voice and ever-rolling blue eyes he comes across more like a high school kid wearing his father’s suit than a senior prosecutor in a big, tough city. (Oh, for a quick jolt of Ford’s rumbling, self-deprecatory but irreducible masculinity.) Only Peter Sarsgaard, as a malicious but not-that-smart enemy of Rusty’s, is bang-on and fun to watch.

All the actors seem to have been encouraged to emote maximally, and watching Gyllenhaall freak out in one murkily shot interior after another, as the score’s semi-subsonic doom-chords swell and die and swell again, gets boring fast.

But not to worry – Kelly breaks up the sepia-toned confabs by having our Rusty swim lonely laps in that vast, depopulated Olympic pool where TV characters go to show off their bodies and dampen their anxiety. While Rusty churns through the water, he naturally flashes back to grotesque close-ups of the dead woman – Kelly’s camera loves a tortured female corpse. No cliche remains undeployed.

At least there’s no dialogue in the pool scenes. Lines like “The clock is ticking on this and my expiration date is in the crosshairs” – an actual quote – make every moment of quiet a relief. 

Turow is listed as a producer and writer on the show and was certainly paid plenty for this dumb, heavy-breathing slog. Still, he should sue.