With Big Little Lies, The Undoing and Nine Perfect Strangers, David E. Kelley has become the maestro of pulpy potboilers coated in a sheen of prestige, and he once again puts his melodramatic skills to use with Anatomy of a Scandal. An adaptation of Sarah Vaughan’s bestseller, the six-part Netflix series is a legal thriller teeming with corrupt government officials, family strife, courtroom intrigue and deep, dark secrets from the past that are just dying to come to light. It’s basically everything this glossy subgenre is known for, which is in large part why its moralizing surprises make next to no impact.
Co-created and written by Melissa James Gibson, Kelley’s latest (April 15) concerns James Whitehouse (Rupert Friend), a U.K. minister in the government of Prime Minister Tom Southern (Geoffrey Streatfeild), with whom he attended Oxford. James’ perfect life comes crumbling down when his mistress Olivia Lytton (Naomi Scott) accuses him of raping her in a House of Commons elevator, which naturally doesn’t sit well with James’ loyal wife Sophie (Sienna Miller), who knew nothing about her husband’s extramarital activities. No matter the efforts of Tom’s fixer Chris Clarke (Joshua McGuire), James is soon plastered all over the tabloids and the nightly news and, shortly thereafter, winds up in court, where he’s defended by Angela Regan (Josette Simon) and prosecuted by Kate Woodcroft (Michelle Dockery).
Kate’s formidability is underlined by an introductory scene of almost comically overdone breakneck motion and cutting, full of images of her racing through streets and opening and closing an umbrella, and series director S.J. Clarkson doesn’t let up for the remainder of her six episodes. Anatomy of a Scandal is obsessed with rapid edits, slow-motion, smeary visuals, canted angles and camerawork that woozily tilts and rotates on its axis. Such devices aim to mirror the anxiety, fear and fury of James, Sophie and Kate, but they’re so excessive that they go beyond complementary or shorthand storytelling gestures and tip straight into affectation. Moreover, they’re incessant, so that it quickly comes to feel like the show only has a few tricks up its sleeve and must desperately rely on them to prevent the action from dragging.
That nonetheless happens often, given that Anatomy of a Scandal—like countless streaming efforts before it—likely could have wrapped up its case in four installments. On numerous occasions, scenes fill in humdrum gaps that might have been ignored altogether, contributing to a sense that things have been padded in order to reach a predetermined length. That’s true with regard to Kate’s every conversation with friend Ally, in whom she confides her buried trauma and present-day misconduct. And it also holds for at least half of the domestic interactions between James and Sophie, the latter distraught over the likelihood that she’s sleeping with the enemy, and the former adamant that he’s innocent and thus prone to proclaiming—along with his young, doting kids—that “Whitehouses always come out on top!”
Flashbacks elucidate that James had it made from the start—a handsome, wealthy, connected Oxford lad who was also a member (with Tom) of the Libertines, a group that encouraged uninhibited (read: bad) behavior from its all-male associates. This apparently struck Sophie as charming, even though it’s obvious that James and his buddies were boorish creeps who liked to spend their days and nights sexually spraying around champagne, breaking stuff, and groping any female who was unfortunate enough to cross their paths. They were arrogant, entitled chauvinists, and their privilege allowed them to get ahead regardless of their abhorrent conduct, proven by the fact that Tom is now the British Prime Minister and James enjoys a charmed existence. From what’s depicted, it’s also clear that these men believed they could do as they pleased and suffer no consequences, thereby suggesting that the confident and persuasive James might be guilty of violating Olivia.
There’s much talk about the nature of consent in Anatomy of a Scandal’s early going, but most of that is just hot air; the primary focus here is on a particular brand of upper-crust toxic masculinity, and the way in which the elite both work together to further their ends (and protect each other’s backs) and operate with an air of righteous impunity. With no evidence to support her claims, and a long history of having risqué sex with James in workspaces, Olivia’s accusation boils down to he said, she said, and yet every time a legal break goes James’ way, it’s impossible not to feel like the show is merely playing a tired game that will ultimately end with his exposure as a villain. Friend’s oh-so-charming routine furthers that expectation, his cheery composure and self-assurance coming across as the sort that’s projected by a conniving sociopath convinced he’s superior to everyone in his orbit.
As is generally the case with such fit-for-beach-reading tales, Anatomy of a Scandal has third-act bombshells lying in wait, one of which is preposterous beyond belief, and made even more ludicrous by everyone’s refusal to explain how or why it’s possible in the first place. Kelley and Gibson follow a standard-issue playbook, their timing of their misdirections and twists so predictable you could set your watch to them. Those revelations, in the end, turn out to be laughably convenient and illogical. Worse still, though, is the proceedings’ hectoring tone and pedestrian things to say about the well-to-do, and the you-go-girl camaraderie needed to bring them to their knees.
With material this second-hand, Dockery and Miller can do little more than overemote with relish, their anguish and terror only matched by their determination to figure out the truth about James, and his potential habit of taking what he wants and then stating he did nothing wrong. Dockery in particular lays the theatrical posturing on thick, be it at home (where she sometimes sleeps with her own married paramour) or in the courtroom (where, at one point, she hilariously loses her composure like a lawyer who’s never stood before a judge). She’s not responsible for all of Anatomy of a Scandal’s shortcomings, but her performance does much to exacerbate this affair’s prosaic corniness.
