Your Honor review: perfectly fine – if you can forget about Breaking Bad

What is the only rule when you have had a great one-night stand? That’s right – don’t go back. It won’t be the same. The planets will not align again. It is over. Move on.

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

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

Your Honor is scrubbed clean of all that. It is Breaking Basic. That said, it begins with a breathtakingly suspenseful and harrowing car accident and a drawn-out death 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.

Desiato’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. Panic-stricken, he watches the boy die and, after an abortive attempt to call an ambulance, flees the scene.

Style-wise, things fall off a cliff thereafter. We first meet Michael as he destroys a police witness in court. He has secretly investigated the officer’s claims against a black single mother and knows the cop to be a lying racist. He is a Good Guy, you see? Do you see? Do you? The Dr Kildare of Louisiana.

Still, the premise is sound. 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 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). A confession by Adam would be a death warrant.

With that revelation, a binary choice is forced on Michael and all interesting narrative avenues are blocked. The ethical quandaries, the potential nuances of his position, are gone. Of course you wouldn’t condemn your son to death at the hands of a crime lord. That would be stupid – tantamount to killing him yourself. So, the series become a traditional cat-and-mouse setup, with Michael using his knowledge of the law and his professional connections to stay one step ahead of the bad guys.

Your Honor is lifted by uniformly great performances. Cranston, of course, brings to this weaker material all the talent, subtlety and commitment he brought to Walter White. Hunter Doohan as Adam does fine work evoking the struggles of a boy old enough to be abraded by the burden of unexpiated guilt, but too young to believe in the imminence of his death if he puts down his load, thus putting him at odds with his father. Margo Martindale, who turns up a few episodes in as Michael’s whisky-drinking, antagonistic mother-in-law, Elizabeth, is a glorious force to be reckoned with, as always.

If it weren’t for the shadow of Breaking Bad looming over the whole thing, you wouldn’t think twice. To return to our opening metaphor, it is perfectly reasonable. You can’t expect fireworks every night.