In the last year, Netflix has begun producing original series in Kuwait, and those series show modern women butting up against the Arab traditions in that country. A new series has a young lawyer defending a soccer star when she is the only one who thinks he didn’t murder his wife.
Opening Shot: An overhead view of a neighborhood in Kuwait City; we hear an emergency operator field a call from a panicked man saying his wife was dead.
The Gist: Bader Khaled (Ali Kakooli) is a star for Al-Arabi, one of the city’s best soccer teams; he found his wife Dalal Abdulla (Sara Salah) on the kitchen floor of their home, bloodied and lifeless. With only circumstantial evidence, it seems that the police are looking at him as the killer.
He’s got his supporters, namely fans of Al-Arabi, whose fortunes are sinking because one of their best players is not on the pitch. But it’s a case that’s roiled the country, pitting those fans against people looking for women to have a voice.
Loulwa (Haya Abdulsalam), a young defense attorney, gets a call about the case from her friend Hoda (Nouf Al Sultan), a reporter that’s been on the story. She cuts her vacation short and tells her father (Hasan Ibrahim), the lead prosecutor on the case, that she wants to defend Bader. She doesn’t believe that the evidence gathered against him makes any sense. Her father warns her to stay off the case.
Bader is questioned by Yousef, the lead detective in the case, who thinks that Bader is the only person who was in the house, and he’s the only logical choice. Bader keeps putting him off, not giving him anything to help the case.
Yousef and Loulwa have a history, as they were in a relationship and set to marry, but he ended up going back to his ex-wife when she got pregnant. A long flashback establishes how he broke her heart.
Flashbacks between Bader and Dalal show the two of them in a loving relationship; he claims they never fought. But one of the reasons that Loulwa wants to take the case is because she didn’t realize it at the time, but Dalal was calling her, depressed and seeking advice over the fact that she couldn’t have a child. It was something that Bader seemed to be OK with, but Dalal was heartsick over.
Loulwa visits him in prison, and insists to her father that he be put in solitary for his own protection; she also thinks his knee injury would have prevented him from struggling with Dalal, as the medical examiner’s evidence shows happened.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Devil’s Advocate is more or less a standard courtroom show, a la The Lincoln Lawyer, albeit set in Kuwait.
Our Take: Despite the setting, there isn’t really anything about Devil’s Advocate that would set it apart from a standard courtroom drama. Sure, there are the vagaries of the Kuwati justice system, and the burgeoning role of women in it. There are some weird dramatic choices, like Yousef and Loulwa having a romantic history, and her being opposite her father in the case. But all that aside, the show is a pretty straightforward story about someone who believes her client is innocent, despite everyone in her circle thinking the opposite.
As the seven shortish episodes move along, we’ll see some of the family history of both Bader and Loulwa, including the mental illness Bader’s mother suffers from. There will likely be some twists and turns that might make the viewer think that Bader is keeping critical information from his attorney and he may have killed his wife after all. There will be secrets revealed.
How do we know? Because we’ve seen so many shows like these, that the broad strokes are generally the same. There’s nothing about this show that would tell us otherwise. And given the show’s penchant for long, florid flashbacks, there doesn’t seem to be a heck of a lot of time to develop anything deeper than the basic courtroom potboiler.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: A woman wakes up after imagining someone is whispering in her ear. Then she turns and sees an injured woman holding a knife.
Sleeper Star: Nouf Al Sultan has the thankless task of playing “the friend” in this series; Hoda is there to support her friend Loulwa in her efforts to prove Bader’s innocence, but her character probably won’t go much beyond that.
Most Pilot-y Line: In the flashback, Loulwa tells Yousef to just say want he wants to say to her face. The weird thing is, he did just that before she says it.
Our Call: SKIP IT. Devil’s Advocate doesn’t really have anything to offer that’s different from courtroom shows you’ve seen from this country dozens of times.
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.