Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Your Honor’ Season 2 On Showtime, Where Bryan Cranston’s Disgraced Judge Mourns His Son And Works To Bring The Baxters Down

The first season of Your Honor premiered on Showtime back in December 2020 to middling reviews, most of which unfavorably compared the show to Breaking Bad, for which star Bryan Cranston won an armful of Emmys. The premises were similar, about good men who spiraled out of control in an attempt to protect their families. What was intended to be a limited series somehow got a second and final season, one where Cranston’s character, Michael Desiato, is disgraced in and mourning. Where can it really go from there?

YOUR HONOR SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We see a swamp, then a shot of a state penitentiary.

The Gist: Guards go to a cell to get an inmate, and an emaciated man, with wild curly hair and a massive beard, slowly uncurls himself from bed. It turns out to be former judge Michael Desiato (Bryan Cranston), who is in prison a number of months after his son Adam (Hunter Doohan) was shot and killed by Eugene Jones (Benjamin Flores Jr.). Eugene was actually aiming for Carlo Baxter (Jimi Stanton), as revenge for killing his brother.

We’re not sue why Michael is in prison, but we do know that he’s so despondent he’s starving himself, to the point where he has to be force fed through a feeding tube. He gets a visit from U.S. Attorney Olivia Delmont (Rosie Perez), who is looking to suppress all of the statements Michael made connecting him to Jimmy Baxter (Michael Stuhlbarg) and his crime family if Michael helps her bring the whole Baxter organization down. Michael refuses.

We also see the immediate aftermath of the shooting, with Carlo chasing Eugene, who can’t escape the clutches of the Desire gang; Big Mo (Andrene Ward-Hammond) wants to pretty much eliminate Eugene, but Little Mo (Keith Machekanyanga) might defy his boss there. Fia Baxter (Lilli Kay), Adam’s girlfriend, was next to him when he was shot, and her father Jimmy and mother Gina (Hope Davis) try to comfort her, all the while looking for Eugene.

When Carlo comes around the Lower Ninth Ward looking for Eugene, Big Mo’s guys capture him, and she proposes a trade to Baxter: Let me take care of Eugene and we won’t touch Carlo. After all, she thinks, no use starting a gang war at this point.

In the meantime, Delmont is telling the local law enforcement authorities, including Detective Nancy Costello (Amy Landecker), that they need to suppress Michael’s admissions in order to look at the big picture, but they can throw him in prison on other charges. Back in the later timeframe, Michael volunteers for the prison rodeo (a real thing, by the way), with the hope that a wayward bull ends it all. Instead, he is just bruised, and Delmont uses his friendship with soon-to-be-mayor Charlie Figaro (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), whom he also implicated to the police after the shooting, as leverage to get Michael to help her.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Your Honor Season 1, which we thought was a not-as-good take on the Breaking Bad formula of a virtuous person who is forced to do bad things. This season feels like it’s going to be more of an aftermath/redemption arc for Michael Desiato.

Our Take: We weren’t quite sure why Your Honor, created by Peter Moffat, got a second season, given that it seemed that the first season was a pretty closed-ended story. Michael goes to all sorts of lengths to protect Adam from the Baxter family, then the kid ends up getting killed anyway. It was intended to be a limited series, so that seemed like a good place to stop.

Which is one of the reasons why this second-season premiere confounds us. The first thing it does is run on two slightly separate timelines: One right after Adam was killed and one some months/years later as Michael is sprung from prison by Delmont in order for him to help her bring down the Baxter family. Because the timelines are relatively close together — maybe a year, given what we see with Fia, maybe less — they get confusing to keep track of.

But there are some facts that are also muddled. Delmont suggests to the New Orleans DA to send Michael up on tax evasion charges. But unless he’s accused of evading state taxes, he’d be in a federal prison instead of Angola State Penitentiary. So what is he doing there? And, other than his abject mourning for his son, why has he stopped taking care of himself?

In addition to all of this muddied storytelling, though, the main problem we have with Your Honor remains, despite the stellar cast: The rest of the characters surrounding Cranston don’t have a lot of depth to them. And with all of the moving parts, from the Baxters to the Desire gang to Figaro’s compromised political career, there really doesn’t seem to be enough time to give anyone anything but the broadest characteristics. And now, we fear that even Cranston isn’t given as much to do as he was during the first season; at the very least, we see him a whole lot less in this first episode than we expected.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Michael is released from prison; he stands outside the gates not knowing what to do. He gets a call on a burner phone; Delmont tells him he made a good choice to cooperate.

Sleeper Star: As with last season, we’ll watch Hope Davis do just about anything. There’s a scene where she hugs her son Carlo that indicates that they’re a little, um, closer than a mother and her adult son should be.

Most Pilot-y Line: Delmont sees the injured Michael and jokes, “If it’s any consolation, the bull was denied parole.” That like is way less funny than it might have seemed in the writers’ room.

Our Call: SKIP IT. With a little bit less Cranston, a whole lot of confusing storytelling and characters that haven’t gotten any deeper than in Season 1, Your Honor‘s final season feels like an idea that was best left as just that: an idea.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.