It’s apparently Jake Gyllenhaal’s turn to take a crack at that old Prestige TV standard, the Difficult Male Antihero. He stars in Presumed Innocent as Rusty Sabich – whom this writer thought was called “Savage” for the first couple of episodes – a hot-shot lawyer with a beautiful wife, two kids and a lot of skeletons in his closet.

When Carolyn Polhemus (Renate Reinsve), one of his colleagues, is brutally murdered, he becomes obsessed with finding the killer. Unfortunately, he quickly becomes the main suspect himself when it comes out that he was having an affair with her. Things rapidly go from bad to worse for him, and his life starts falling apart while he tries to build the case for his defence.

The show’s biggest strength is Gyllenhaal’s performance, but the biggest weakness is arguably Sabich himself. He’s such an archetypal Complicated Man that they’ve seemingly forgotten to give him any real redeeming qualities, with even one of his best friends calling him out as a charming psychopath at one point. Gyllenhaal gives it his all and certainly nails that superficial charm belying darkness and unpleasantness beneath, but Sabich is such a terrible person that it’s almost impossible to sympathise with him.

What you want with this type of character is a Tony Soprano figure, where he’s a repulsive excuse for a human being but so magnetic you want him to succeed anyway. Presumed Innocent is more like the final season of Breaking Bad, where Walter White had become so completely despicable that they had to make the villains literal Nazis to keep the audience on his side. The difference here is that Breaking Bad had had four seasons to get us on Team Walt prior to that point, where Sabich is like this right out of the gate.

It’s almost funny how much the show villainises the prosecutor in the murder case, another of Sabich’s colleagues called Tommy Molto (Peter Sarsgaard). He and Nico Della Guardia (O-T Fagbenle), who’s running for District Attorney and wants a win to cement his campaign, are such school-bully types with obvious agendas and axes to grind that they’d stretch plausibility in any other show. Here, however, Sabich is so awful that you kind of see their point, understand why they hate him so much and hope they take him down. It certainly helps that Sarsgaard and Fagbenle turn in a pair of deeply compelling performances, investing their characters with unexpected complexity and giving them a very engrossing love-hate relationship.

That’s the thing about Presumed Innocent: while it is significantly flawed, there’s nonetheless a lot to like and ire about it. To reiterate, the cast are excellent across the board, particularly Ruth Negga as Sabich’s long-suffering wife Barbara, and while Reinsve has limited screen time, inevitably only appearing in flashbacks, she does make us understand why Sabich fell so hard for her.

The story is knotty and complicated, reliably giving us exciting and believable cliffhangers at the end of episodes, without ever descending into histrionics and melodrama. The ending of the penultimate episode in particular is an absolute belter, sure to leave audiences desperate to know what happens next. We’re deep into Sabich’s murder trial by then, and Presumed Innocent is easily at its best when that trial finally begins; it’s involving and gripping from the off but really kicks it up a gear at that point.

This is another handsomely produced and impeccably acted show for Apple TV+, whose commitment to quality continues to deliver results. If you’ve missed the complex, morally-questionable likes of Tony Soprano, Walter White and Don Draper, chances are good you’ll find much to enjoy here. From a production standpoint there’s very little to fault about it, but it would have been nice to have a defendant whom you actually want to be innocent.