Kavanagh QC: “Nothing But the Truth”

previously: Screen ONe: “doggin’ around”

As I understand it, Kavanagh QC is a beloved classic of British TV. And while I know it can take time for a series to find its footing, boy do I just not see the appeal from the pilot episode.

To be fair, today was a pretty bad mental health day for me. And the subject matter of this episode, uh, did not help.

Kavanagh QC is a series centering on James Kavanagh, Queen’s Council, an attorney (or “barrister,” as they’re called in England,) who is very good at his job, despite his family troubles.

The pilot episode introduces us to Kavanagh, his family, and colleagues. I’m not really going to be touching on much of that, except to say that there were too many of those scenes and they all went on for way too long. I don’t know, I’m more partial to the first episode structures of series like Columbo or Murder, She Wrote. I realize those are more straightforward mysteries rather than legal dramas, but they still focus on a main character making sure justice is done every week with a new cast of characters.

In the first Columbo pilot, Columbo doesn’t even show up for the first half hour. The pilot is laser focused on the actual crime and the murderer. You’re rooting for Columbo, but the pilot doesn’t seem to much care if you learn anything about him or get attached to him. In the first episode of Murder, She Wrote, Jessica is tasked with defending her nephew from a murder accusation in the midst of the whirlwind success of her first published novel. The episode does a really good job of introducing us to Jessica and integrating her into the mystery of the week in a smooth and believable manner. Both approaches slowly warm you up to the main characters while leaving you wanting more.

In the first half hour or so of the first episode of Kavanagh, it keeps cutting back and forth between Kavanagh and his family life and the alleged build-up, occurrence, and aftermath of the crime of the week. It feels completely jarring and disconnected. It’ll show a very brief scene of Ewan McGregor digging a hole and then smash cut back to Kavanagh having dinner with friends for seemingly no reason. It feels like both tonal and locational whiplash.

I would really like to be sensitive to other people’s cultures, but holy god, am I ready for Ewan McGregor to start being in American movies. I’ve always considered myself to be good with understanding unfamiliar accents, but part of the reason I’m not going to be summarizing Kavanagh’s personal life is because I could barely parse any of it. People with very thick accents talking over each other, or whispering in the middle of loud parties, it was just…I don’t think I could’ve brought myself to care about this guy I don’t know and don’t plan on seeing again even if I could understand what anyone was saying.

It felt like this, but with English people.

Here’s a brief list of what I did manage to glean about Kavanagh’s personal life that has absolutely no bearing on the actual story in this episode:

• His marriage almost fell apart because his wife had an affair with a younger man who happens to be one of Kavanagh’s coworkers
• The affair is over but the guy is still putting the moves on his wife, and Kavanagh still wants this man dead
• His marriage still might fall apart
• His daughter is dating a guy he disapproves of
• His son doesn’t respect him
• His daughter doesn’t respect him either
• Her boyfriend doesn’t respect him
• He has an elderly father (?), who I think also doesn’t respect him
• His assistant (??) is spurning advances from a rival (???) who’s implied to be racist (????)

There’s probably more I missed or misinterpreted. It’s way too much to frontload with. It’s trying too hard. All of this is being thrown at me, and I’m just left going, “Did I ask??” I just met this guy, I did not need to know every excruciating detail of his miserable personal drama all at once.

The case in this episode involves a middle-aged, married woman named Eve Kendall (played by Alison Steadman) who accuses a college student, David Armstrong (played by Ewan McGregor) of raping her.

We see that he and another young man have been hired to build the Kendalls a pool, and have been working on this for a few weeks. On this particular day, David’s partner gets called away to an emergency at another job, and Mrs. Kendall, who was fighting with her husband before he left, invites David into the house for lunch. We hear something suggestive, but we don’t see it.

Later that day, Mr. Kendall comes home to find his wife has barricaded herself in the bathroom. She initially seems to be in shock, then becomes hysterical when he touches her. At the police station, her mouth is swabbed and samples from her fingernails are taken.

That evening, David Armstrong is arrested for raping her.

David’s father is wealthy, and hires Kavanagh to defend him. David claims that they did have sex, but that it was consensual, and that she made the first move on him.

I’m also not going to go in detail about the court scenes. Kavanagh and the prosecution mercilessly cross-examine each other’s witnesses, and it’s deeply unpleasant. Also, again, I’d like to be sensitive to other people’s cultures, but the barrister wigs look stupid, they just do.

Both David and Mrs. Kendall have holes in their stories. It’s almost like during a traumatic incident, you don’t always clearly remember everything because sometimes your brain turns off to protect you, and a stranger yelling at you in public, demanding to know why you can’t remember every detail of the worst moment of your life, is not conducive to remembering what your brain desperately tried to shield you from.

Kavanagh’s college-aged daughter is sitting in the courtroom watching her dad, and she confronts him later. She believes Mrs. Kendall, and is upset that her dad would defend someone accused of rape, upset that he would treat an alleged victim the way he did, demanding to know, “What if it was me?” Her dad counters by asking, what if someone falsely accused her brother of rape, wouldn’t he have the right to a fair trial? Wow, he really is a lawyer. He completely avoided having to seriously consider her question.

In the end, David is the last to take the stand. He seems calm and firm at first, maintaining that Mrs. Kendall came onto him and he regretted giving in immediately because he has a girlfriend. He insists that he did not rape her. But he soon breaks down emotionally under intense cross-examination, addressing Mrs. Kendall and asking why she’s doing this to him, calling her “Eve,” and begging her to tell the truth before the judge calls him down.

After closing arguments, the jury is torn. I guess there’s no such thing as a hung jury in England in some cases, because the judge says he’ll accept a verdict agreed upon by ten out of twelve jurors. Apparently this is a real standard in the English court system? This is wild to me. It fully sounds fake. I realize the American justice system is bad, but I cannot imagine the kind of chaos this standard would cause in the US. You guys have those ridiculous wigs because of decorum or whatever, but you’ll accept a two-out-of-three majority verdict on a charge as serious as rape? What the hell is going on over there??

After more deliberating, the jury comes back with at least ten jurors declaring David not guilty. He celebrates with his relieved father and girlfriend. Mrs. Kendall quietly leaves the courthouse after making eye contact with David one last time, her husband joining her.

That night, Kavanagh goes for drinks with his colleagues, including the prosecution, who good-naturedly congratulates him. When he’s alone, though, a young woman approaches him, saying she was in the courtroom and that he’s really good. Kavanagh asks if she’s a friend of David’s. She says they’re classmates, and that he raped her. He raped her, she says, like he raped Mrs. Kendall, and his father will keep hiring good attorneys like Kavanagh and he’ll keep getting away with it. Kavanagh tells her that by not filing a police report, maybe she’s more to blame for David’s continued freedom than he is, actually. She tells him she has no interest in being torn apart on the stand by someone like him and just wants to get on with her life. Kavanagh asks her name before she leaves, but she only asks if the other young woman in court was his daughter, watching him get a rapist set free.

The wind taken out of his sails, Kavanagh goes back to his office before heading home early. He finds David waiting there for him, looking at a picture of his daughter. David tells him he’s there because he didn’t get a chance to properly thank him earlier. Kavanagh says he ran into a friend of David’s just now and describes the girl he spoke to. David says he doesn’t know her: “Doesn’t mean anything to me.” Kavanagh coldly says, “No, I didn’t think it would.”

At home, Mrs. Kavanagh comforts her husband and he concedes to his daughter that she was right as they embrace.

Look, Witness for the Prosecution, this is not. Because in part, even at his crustiest, Charles Laughton was still way more likable and charming than I found John Thaw to be, I’m sorry. Also, the writing’s way better in Witness. The court scenes are more compelling. The mystery’s more clever. It has much-needed moments of levity throughout. And it ends on a sort of cynical but also weirdly kind of upbeat note, rather than this extreme downer that rapists go free sometimes and there’s nothing the survivors can do about it and women should comfort the men in their lives who uphold unjust systems for profit instead of allowing them even a single perfectly justified “I told you so.”

I don’t even know if I can articulate why I found this episode to be so deeply unpleasant, aside from the obvious, basic, condescending, borderline insulting handling of the delicate subject matter. I could tell this episode was written by a man, is what I’m saying. It doesn’t feel like it’s taking you along for a ride, like any good mystery or drama should. It feels like it’s trying to pull one over on you and then it wants you to feel stupid if you bought into what it was telling you. Like, “Wow, look at polite, handsome, likeable Ewan McGregor. What a nice young man, how could he ever rape anybody? Surprise, you dumb bitch.” There’s that. And also the fact that it doesn’t ever seem like it’s asking you to truly empathize with the right people. It assumes that we’re as deeply shaken by this revelation that false rape accusations are not really a thing as Kavanagh is. I’m not shaken at all, and he’s been doing this for a long time. He shouldn’t be shaken either, and I’m frustrated that I’m expected to feel more pity for him than the actual victims of the crime when he’s the one enabling continued injustice and actively victim-blaming and endangering witnesses to the bitter end.

For the record, I knew that the initial framing of the episode was trying to convince me that David was innocent. And I did honestly try to see it from that perspective. But try as I might to accept the framing that was being sold to me, I leaned more to the side that he was guilty from the very beginning. I mean, the barristers themselves say that Mrs. Kendall doesn’t have a good reason to go through all this if it weren’t true. The best they’ve got is that her husband is cheating on her and she wants attention and sympathy. Even though I’m like, “False accusations almost never happen, especially not against wealthy white men like David,” I did try to tell myself that maybe this fictional accusation was false, and I really did try to see it that way. But Mrs. Kendall’s testimony was legitimately compelling, and the holes that both sides were trying to poke into the stories were flimsy at best. But I thought David’s story did ultimately come off as less believable. And the way Mrs. Kendall reacted when no one could see her also told me what I needed to know. So the big reveal that he is a rapist, actually? I was like, “Yeah. I know.”

While I really disliked basically the entire stable of what I presume to be the recurring cast, I can say nice things about both Alison Steadman’s and Ewan’s performances. They are subtle enough that you could read what you want to believe into them, either way. But Steadman’s performance has a quiet sadness and acceptance that, like I said, confirmed to me that her character was telling the truth without making it blatant, which is vital to a “twist” ending like this.

Ewan does come across as very charming and likable, which is the entire horrifying point. He also seems very believable when he breaks down on the witness stand, even though this is implied in the end to be a desperate, performative act of manipulation rather than a genuine plea for mercy. And when Kavanagh discovers him alone in his office afterwards, in the dark, holding his daughter’s photo, he makes what could be an innocent comment: He says she’s a pretty girl. But at that moment, it’s absolutely chilling. In that final scene, there’s a subtle change to his demeanor. He comes across as ever-so-slightly colder. It’s not just that we know the truth so now he can do a sudden heel turn for no reason. He’s not twirling his metaphorical evil mustache just because the main character realized what he did. It’s because the trial is over. He’s keeping up appearances, but he doesn’t have to convince anyone anymore, and he knows it. Again, his performance is what confirms that Mrs. Kendall was telling the truth after all.

I don’t plan on watching any more of this series. The performances from the guests more than the recurring stars are what made the story work. The writing itself seemed like it thought it was smarter than it was, and it felt like it was fighting against me rather than actually trying to create a natural or compelling legal drama. The style of editing, especially at the beginning, was distracting, jarring, and unnecessary. And the amount of time up front trying to set up the regular characters is understandable, but comes across as confusing, desperate, and frustrating when we could have learned enough important initial information about them simply by their reactions to the case at hand.

I can be generous and say this probably was groundbreaking television for 1995. But watching it for the first time in 2022, I’m just so very tired.

I really am sorry, English people. I went in with high expectations wanting to like this one because I was aware it means a lot, and maybe it gets better. But I feel like I’ve seen more than enough.

Coming up next: Blue juice