Jacob Barber is 14 years old. He’s a seemingly good kid who is also frequently exasperated and uncommunicative with his parents.
In other words, he’s a normal teenage boy.
The question in Defending Jacob, a closed-end miniseries that premieres Friday on Apple TV+, is whether he’s also a murderer.
Based on William Landay’s best-selling 2012 crime novel of the same name, Defending Jacob explores a set of murky circumstances primarily through the eyes of Jacob’s supportive yet vaguely uncertain parents.
Andy Barber (Chris Evans, top), Jacob’s father, is an assistant district attorney in the family’s small Massachusetts town.
His wife, Laurie (Michelle Dockery, top), has a responsible corporate job and is an obsessive runner.
Jacob (Jaeden Martell) is their only child, and as kids go, he’s been dealt a pretty decent hand. Besides providing a comfortable life, Andy and Laurie are reasonably cool on the parent scale. Not that this makes them any more tolerable to Jacob. He is, remember, 14.
All their lives seem about as routine as possible until one of Jacob’s classmates, Ben Rifkin (Liam Kilbreth), is found stabbed to death in a park two blocks from the Barber house. Jacob walks through that park on his way to school, a fact that sends a shiver of dread down Laurie’s spine. What if the victim of this apparently senseless killing had been Jacob?
That narrative soon shifts, however, when some shadowy innuendos and a couple of forensic facts suggest Jacob might have been the killer.
Andy and Laurie, horrified, are quite sure nothing in Jacob’s life has ever suggested he would be capable of anything remotely close to this brutal act.
When the Internet reveals that Jacob wrote a rather cold-blooded murder story, they still don’t buy that there could be a connection. By now, however, Chris has been taken off the case, and it has been reassigned to Neal Loguidice (Pablo Schreiber), Chris’s office rival, who Chris considers an arrogant self-promoter.
Chris doesn’t completely shed his investigative hat, though his primary focus shifts from prosecutor to defender of his son – a role that, unsurprisingly, distances him further from Loguidice.
Defending Jacob rides that thread as a slow procession of ancillary facts helps steer the story forward. We learn Andy has a family secret, we see a different side of Laurie, and we discover, to no one’s surprise, that even relatively smart parents have no idea what kind of things their kids are doing and talking about on the Internet.
The twists are often clever, and, as events tumble forward, Jacob’s demeanor seems credible for a 14-year-old. The series also doesn’t telegraph where everything will end, so viewers can create their own scenarios as they go along.
The first three episodes of Defending Jacob will be made available Friday, and one additional episode will be posted each Friday until the conclusion.