How to Get Away With Murder: He Has a Wife

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Liz Weil and Tom Verica in ABC Television’s “How to Get Away with Murder”

Welcome back to another episode of Everyone is Horrible, the show that makes sure to remind you that every single person in the world has a deep, twisted secret and seriously screwed-up morals. At the rate this show is going, the guy stitching up Lila’s body in the autopsy scenes is going to turn out to be a pedophile and that spinning cheerleader we see every week will have a secret terrorist background. Because everyone is horrible. EVERYONE is HORRIBLE.

Actually, we kinda wish there were terrorists and pedophiles at every turn in this story, because a story where everyone is twisted and dark and terrible can be a lot of fun if it’s done right. The problem with this show is that everyone is horrible in pretty much the exact same ways over and over again. Everyone cheats on their significant other and everyone works hard every week to, well, get away with murder (or help someone else to). That’s it. That’s as deep as the show is willing to go on the whole “darkness of the human condition” thing. Killing and fucking. Caveman morality. It feels like the show is trying to make some deeper point about sex and murder (especially when it cuts between dead bodies on tables and live bodies having sex); as if it was trying to delineate some sort of connection between the two. But the only thing it’s managed to say is “Sex is hot” and “Murder is bad.” Alrighty, then. Just give us a second to get a pen so we can write that down.

As an aside, who the hell takes their shirts completely off when they’re having sex in a car parked on the street outside their place of work? Have some dignity, you whores. Get it right.

Back to everyone being horrible: It’s hard to get as invested in the whole “Sam is a bad man” thing when he’s only marginally worse than most of the other people in the cast. He wins the “baddest bad of them all” prize if he actually killed Lila, but let’s face it: no one really believes that at this point, do they? This show is obvious, but it’s not that obvious. So Sam is bad because he cheated on his wife. That’s different from everyone else cheating on everyone else in this story because …?

Sure, Viola gave that mission-statement speech several episodes back about how everyone’s capable of doing bad things. We get that it’s the driving theme of the entire series. But literally every single character puts on and takes off their moral codes as if they were no more than coats on a day when the weather keeps changing. The show wants to say that all people are capable of doing bad things, but instead it’s showing that no one has any sort of consistent moral code and everyone pretty much sucks. That gets less interesting by the second. As much as we can’t stand Wes’s character, we would have preferred what we originally thought we were going to get with him: a tale about a good, possibly naive person who gets sucked into a world darker than he realized. Instead, he’s just as dishonest and conniving as anyone else in the story. The only thing he hasn’t done is cheat on Rebecca, but we’d bet that’s coming within the next 3 or 4 episodes.

In other news, we meet Michaela’s potential mother-in-law. Guess what? She’s horrible.

It’s possible to enjoy this show for what it is, but we doubt we’ll be able to sustain interest in the long term, even with Viola’s fantastic performance. If it’s just a show about horrible people with nothing more to say about the matter, then after a while (and probably not a long while) we’re going to find it hard to convince ourselves to watch anymore. Couldn’t they at least be horrible interesting people? Or horrible boring people who do interesting things?

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