A Strange, Paranoid New Crime Drama
<em>Accused</em> turns a British series about the powerless into an exploration of anxiety among the privileged.
Whenever British TV shows are remade in the United States, they tend to undergo an uncanny glow-up: a smoothing-out of flaws, a shift in tone from pallid gray to vibrant gold, a wild uptick in the physical attractiveness of their stars. It rarely works, and almost never in crime drama—a key U.K. export—where drabness and despair are necessary textural elements, qualities that inform our understanding of not just how but also why people do the very worst things they do.
, a BBC anthology series that’s been remade for American network television, is the newest example of an asked, is it actually the intractability of the system that’s morally indefensible?
