In Netflix crime series Law School students have a murder to solve, while In Treatment returns to HBO with more mind games
- Law students at Seoul’s Hankuk University have their studies interrupted after the murder of a respected benefactor and professor in Netflix whodunit Law School
- In Treatment returns for a fourth season with Uzo Aduba, seen previously in Orange is the New Black, taking over from Gabriel Byrne in the psychiatrist’s chair
Some shocking on-the-job training presents itself to students at Seoul’s Hankuk University in Law School (Netflix, series one now streaming).
Working diligently to become the next generation of servants to the South Korean legal system, the students are conducting a mock trial when their carefully choreographed courtroom drama is interrupted by a real crime: murder.
The victim, found behind the scenes at the university’s imitation court, is one of their own, a former chief prosecutor and lately a university benefactor and professor. Lurid headlines claim he took his own life, but where lawyers are involved matters of truth and justice are never going to be so simple.
Stepping in to help the investigation – when not doling out tough love bordering on verbal abuse to the students – is another former prosecutor, the intimidating Yang Jong-hoon (Kim Myung-min). Which is where the case turns genuinely sensational, with Yang being arrested for the murder and hauled away before his incredulous pupils, just as a ravenous press pack descends.
And that’s just the set-up to an intriguing whodunit stretching the length of the series. Also brought into the reckoning are some of the star students, their eight-strong core group coming with enough tangled backstories, grudges and ulterior motives to suggest guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
Leading the rookie, often cocky gang are Han Joon-hwi (Kim Sang-bum), a smug swot who considers himself a heartthrob; Kang Sol A (Ryu Hye-young), who feels out of place because she isn’t from the regulation wealthy background but might be the smartest of the lot; and the frosty, well-dressed and moneyed Kang Sol B (Lee Soo-kyung), who seems to disdain everyone who isn’t, well, her.
Could the killer be lurking among these bright young things? It may be that for one of them, school’s out – forever.
Mind games
Labouring under the pressures of a pandemic isn’t healthy for anyone, which might partly explain the return of In Treatment for a fourth series – more than a decade after its third.
The show’s adventures in psychotherapy were originally guided by Irish movie big-hitter Gabriel Byrne as Baltimore-based Dr Paul Weston. From tomorrow on HBO Go and HBO, Dr Brooke Taylor (Uzo Aduba, seen previously in Orange is the New Black) will be empathising, observing and cajoling clients at her hillside home in Los Angeles, or using the modern diagnostic medium of the video link.
Three subjects constitute her caseload for the 24-episode duration, each returning week after week to be mentally pushed and prodded into revealing concealed and troubling aspects of their true characters. Which makes for some knotty professional challenges for Dr Taylor, who isn’t entirely untroubled herself. As she blurts out tearfully to her own therapist, no one is looking after her.
That she has her own (racial- and relationship-based) difficulties hardly comes as a surprise, however, when she must guide her disparate flock through a minefield of problems. A once-wealthy, convicted fraudster lacking impulse control proves to be potentially violent; a young carer-in-residence despairs at having no life of his own; a spoiled, arrogant, self-styled lesbian sex addict rebels against an overbearing grandmother, who confidently announces, “the gays and the lesbians are at higher risk for everything – failure, depression, addiction”.
Being black and a woman is difficult enough, grandma believes, even if the Black Lives Matter movement has stirred some sort of social conscience.
Latino, white, black … Dr Taylor welcomes all and judges none, even as she totters on her own emotional ledge.
