‘Accused’ Showrunners Howard Gordon & Daniel Pearle Talk Creating A “Psychological Profile Of Intimacy” In Season 2 Premiere & Tease What’s To Come
SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the Season 2 premiere of Accused.
Fox kicked off Season 2 of its crime anthology Accused on Tuesday night with the story of a woman who finds herself on trial after she tries, altruistically, to help a couple find their missing son.
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The premiere episode, titled “Lorraine’s Story,” stars Felicity Huffman as the titular character, a woman who claims to have visions of missing people. In some cases, the details she’s provided authorities have helped them solve cases, and that’s exactly what she’s hoping to do for young Rory, a boy who had gone missing in another state. As she’s watching the news of the boy’s disappearance, she has a vision of him being cared for by an older woman.
She decides to contact the family to let them know their son is alive, and soon she’s become their live-in investigator, doing what she can to provide details to the parents and police to find Rory. Eventually, the police charge a man with the murder of three children, including Rory, despite Lorraine’s insistence that Rory is still alive, and the fact that authorities are unable to find his body.
When Rory’s mother supports the state’s decision to prosecute Lorraine for exploiting the family’s situation and obstructing their investigation, Rory’s father stands by Lorraine’s side, causing even more strife. But, just as even Lorraine is beginning to question her own “gift,” it comes out in court that the police might have influenced their convict’s admission of Rory’s murder.
In the interview below Accused co-showrunners Howard Gordon and Daniel Pearle spoke with Deadline about the premiere episode and what’s to come as Season 2 unfolds.
DEADLINE: What were some of the goals with Season 2? Is there anything you learned or took away from Season 1 that impacted your approach?
HOWARD GORDON: I think we were very proud, by and large. I mean, we think we had better episodes than others in the first season. What we did feel is, because we did 15 episodes, which is an awful lot — I think, both for an audience and frankly, for a creative team — we were grateful for the shorter order, and we just wanted every single one of them to be really, really good. We just wanted to keep making it better. One thing we did try this year, which is only going to be shown at the end of the season as a finale…is an episode that actually takes place five minutes in the future, or kind of in a parallel present. So it’s a little more Black Mirror.
This show is really a way to sort of anthologize the questions that people are asking themselves at this point in history. Whether it’s social media, whether it’s identity, whether it’s wealth, whether it’s work…very universal things, but also refracted through the prism that is very much 2024 and 2025. [The episode involves] AI and a sex robot. I’ll leave it at that. But, as our laws and as our morality and as our minds are trying get used to this changing world, this show seems to be a really good format to ask those questions and dramatize some of that human struggle.
DEADLINE: Can you tell me more about conceptualizing this premiere? Where did this idea come from?
DANIEL PEARLE: It really came from this amazing young writer named Mike Skerrett, who was a protege of Amy Lippman, who created Party of Five and Howard’s known for years. She actually is someone who gave me my first staffing job years ago, and she introduced us to Mike, and he pitched us this idea, which we were both just very intrigued by. Honestly, once we read the first draft, we were both so moved and compelled. It’s, in certain ways, a very quiet episode, but I think the emotional impact is so strong. Felicity’s performance, honestly, just completely blew us away. I think it’s a real tour de force and and we’re just really incredibly proud of it.
GORDON: Danny and I looked at each other and said, ‘This feels like a very high degree of difficulty, and it may not work.’ We just really didn’t know, because the drama lived in such a strangely nuanced place, and when we read the script, we literally called each other and I said, ‘Am I crazy, or is this unbelievable?’ Then when Felicity came on and Sameh Zoabi, who had directed an episode last year…it had a great, great feeling going into it, and then the result, we think, really speaks for itself.
DEADLINE: Most of what Felicity’s character is alleging is so hard to prove in court. How do you flesh out these ideas and make it believable from both sides, especially in a scenario like this?
PEARLE: I think the show really lives in the gray area and stories that really center on fundamental ambiguities, where it’s not black and white. And I think, as you say, an ability like that can’t be proven with hard facts in court. I think it, surprisingly, turns out to be much more about her inner relationship to this. Is it a gift? Is it a curse? Does she believe it fully herself? Is she starting to feel skeptical herself based on what she’s heard in court? The show’s at it’s best when it deals with questions that don’t perfectly fit into a legal framework, or can’t fully be answered or resolved in our current legal system. So I think the nuance and the subtlety of that is ultimately what makes it so powerful and so moving. I’d seen episodes of other procedurals that had to do with this subject matter where it was much more, ‘Oh, this is a con artist. This is the grifter. It turns out it was a fake the whole time,’ which would have been simpler and easier and ultimately less interesting than a character who does believe in their own gift, at least to an extent.
GORDON: I think the details that animate her story, because really, in the broadest terms, it’s about a woman who is lonely and alone in the world. Here’s a set of reasons why she’s alone, and those reasons are separate and apart from her gift…it is a psychological profile of intimacy, of getting closer to people, what happens if you knew too much about what another person thought? I think there’s a basic fear. And then the vibrating relationship between she and Bill Macy as a couple, who your heart goes out to the second you see him coming into that dry cleaner store…
PEARLE: Those of us that are not psychic, we still all know that question of, how much is it worth taking on someone else’s pain and entering someone else’s painful situation? The question of how to get close to people, how to get close to trauma, how to get close to grief without losing yourself in it in some way, I think that’s a very human question that we all grapple with. What’s the cost of that kind of intimacy and that kind of connection? So even though it’s about a very particular person with a very particular gift, I think that, at its core, the questions it’s asking are things that we’ve all asked ourselves.
DEADLINE: Speaking of William H. Macy, how did he and Felicity end up in the same episode together?
PEARLE: I think Felicity actually knew Amy Lippman…but honestly, she popped our heads right away as sort of dream casting. We sent her the script, and she read it and loved it, and we were just totally over the moon. I think then we had a Zoom with her, talking about the other characters. We sort of said ‘Well, if Bill wants to join, that would be great,’ half joking, and she’s like, ‘You know what? Why not? That’d be fun. It’s a great script.’ It’s also, you know, the whole thing shoots, the nine day shoot. One of the things that we pride ourselves on is that I think a lot of actors have had a really great experience on the show, and because it is a one-off, someone like Felicity, who happens to be married to a great actor who’s right for it, why not want to have you both come? It was gravy. I mean, we were pinching ourselves, but presumably, she pitched it to him. He read it too, and said ‘Why not?’
GORDON: We had a harder sell than that, but it was close. ‘Give it to Bill. You’ll have a great couple of weeks up in Toronto.’
PEARLE: I feel like, actually she may have first suggested it herself, Howard. her cell power. My memory is that we were saying, ‘Do you have any friends you want to cast?; And she said, ‘Well, what about my Bill?’ And we said, ‘Well, sure.’
GORDON: You may be right…Nobody remembers anything, exactly.
DEADLINE: Do you feel like your perspectives on these scenarios ever change as you’re writing and working through them?
GORDON: When I first pitched the show, I said to the network, ‘At the end of these episodes, I want people to fall silent and, if they’re watching it with someone, I want them to look at the person and not be able to talk for a moment, because they’re not sure how they feel or what they would do or how they would act in that situation.’ Sometimes it’s not even about answering anything about what you would do, but just shining the light on what does irrational and relentless hope look like, and when is the time to move on? In terms of who we think [is wrong] and what we would do, I don’t know. That’s what I think is good. Ask the question. You may not know the answer, but ask the question about, how would I deal with that?
DEADLINE: What should audiences expect out of this season? You have a ton of heavy hitters lined up across all of these episodes.
PEARLE: Howard mentioned the episode that’s a little bit in the future. I think one thing we leaned into was taking more risks with genre and style. The Taylor Schilling episode is a lot of action. Like, Speed as an Accused episode. You know, the Deborah Winger episode has a lot of comedy. I mean, those ladies are absolutely hilarious, and there’s Latin ballroom dancing in it. There’s music. I think it’s still a very heartfelt episode, and it’s quite moving in the end, but it’s a much brighter color and has actually a lot of laugh out loud comedy. I’m really excited for for that one. Miley Malloy, who’s one of our writers, who wrote and directed her own episode this year, it was her directorial debut, and she just completely knocked out of the park. That’s an episode with Cobie Smulders, and Dina Shihabi and Vella Lovell, who are all just absolutely outstanding. I mean, talk about a script that took a long time to iterate and then come together, because she went through so many iterations. It really paid off. I’m really proud of her, because she actually directed it herself. So it’s really her vision.
Michael Chiklis is directing an episode with Ken Jeong, and that’s going to be exciting. I know Ken is very excited, because he got to do something very different from what he’s known for. I mean, he’s always going to be Ken Jeong. He’s always going to be funny and a joy to watch. But it is a true tragedy. And that one also stars Jamie Chung, who’s absolutely terrific. Just a really powerful script. Sonequa Martin-Green star in our finale, which is set slightly in the future, more like Accused meets Black Mirror.
I think we got to be a little bolder this year and just say, ‘Hey, let’s try this. Why not?’ One thing we learned the first season was that audiences like being kept on their toes in terms of the style. Also just the fact that we get to bring on new directors and new actors for every episode, people really get to make it their own, and really make their own little movie in a way, so the colors are very distinct.
DEADLINE: Speaking of actors who are taking on different roles, you also have Nick Cannon in his first dramatic role since Drumline, over 20 years ago. How did that happen?
GORDON: This is where the Fox family [comes in]. Michael Thorne, an old friend, who I also have to give a shout out for being, really, a champion of this show that in many ways, he didn’t want to do… but once we did, this is where the some of those incoming calls happened. People really started spreading the word that they had actors who’ve done this show say, ‘We’re having a great time on the show.’ So literally, both Nick and Ken went to Mike and I go, ‘Hey, is there any way you could arrange an introduction?’ In many ways, the Ken Jeong episode was really tailored to him specifically, because having met him, we just fell in love with him, his story…Nick, too, was just a gentleman and, I think, wanted to flex some of his chops as an actor. He was really fun to work with.
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