Accused is not just another courtroom drama, and it doesn’t want to be even called so. The episodic show turns the legal drama template on its head. The series chronicles ordinary people wherein each episode opens in a courtroom introducing the accused without knowing their crime or how they ended up on trial and we are told the events that lead them here from the defendant’s point of view. The Telegraph chatted with Howard Gordon — the showrunner of Accused who has also co-developed Homeland, and written shows like The X-Files and 24 — on Accused that’s streaming in India on SonyLIV.

Accused is based on the 2010 BBC One series of the same name. What made you want to revisit it in your own way?

The rights of the show were with Sony, with David Shore — who has developed shows like House and The Good Doctor — who wanted to develop it but he didn’t have the time for it. So they asked me: ‘Hey, you want to have a look at this show?’ I looked at it and a light went off in my head. I wasn’t able to articulate it at that moment, but the biggest reason is that the world is changing so fast and there is a Chinese curse that says: ‘May you live in interesting times’ and the truth is that we are living in interesting times, whether it’s race, gender, power or the truth itself. And how social media is bending the world in so many ways and I feel that someone like me who is of a certain age is not really keeping up with it, legally, morally, psychologically, emotionally.

Accused is a courtroom drama, which is a familiar and compelling narrative device. I felt that this was the perfect format to wrestle with a lot of dramatic questions that I was feeling. At a time when people are weaponising words and saying: ‘I own the truth’ and ‘I am right, you are wrong’, I really wanted to take this opportunity and take a moment to think differently and to feel differently and have different kinds of emotions at the end of each story.

So would pigeonholing Accused into a courtroom drama narrow down its scope and impact?

I always keep telling people that yes it is a courtroom drama, yes it is familiar, but it is so much more than that. It is so much more than ‘guilty’ or ‘innocent’. That part of it is actually the least interesting part... I mean you want to know what happened but the karmic justice at the end of all of it is far more resonant and more meaningful.

I had to keep it compelling till the very end and sometimes, it required a little sleight of hand or a little manipulation (smiles) in order to keep people engaged with the story. I had to make sure that we were not predictable and yet also organic and, in a way, inevitable and also surprising. At least that’s what the intention was.

Accused has created and broken certain viewership records in the US. The premiere episode on Fox was the highest-rated and most-watched debut across broadcast or cable in the last three years. Over and above these numbers, what’s the tenor of the feedback that’s come your way till now?

It’s been a fantasy in a way. When you make something, you always hope that people will respond to it in a certain way. Just personally and anecdotally, I am getting texts and emails from even acquaintances, with so many of them saying how much they liked the show and what emotions it stirred in them. My wife and I spoke for half an hour on the show and that conversation stirred up so many other conversations.

And that’s such a heartening thing because, in the past, I have done some shows where I haven’t heard back from anyone! (Laughs) So I know the difference between that and situations where there is real energy in the response. I am not very much on social media, but from those from the channel who monitor numbers and research trends, I have been told that the show is a talking point among a large part of the audience. There is huge engagement. We made this show to entertain people, but also to feel strongly about it and what it wants to say and I think we have achieved that.

Howard Gordon

What were the challenges of working with this novel concept within a largely familiar template?

When we started out, we had no idea how tough making each episode would be. We had to start everything from scratch. When you do a ‘normal’ show, it will be like: ‘Okay, meet Jack Bauer’ (the protagonist of 24, played by Kiefer Sutherland, with the show written by Gordon) or Carrie Mathison (played by Claire Danes in Homeland, also written by Gordon)’ and have them be on the TV screens of people week after week and year after year if you are lucky. With Accused, it was like making a movie every single time, in every single episode. In terms of narrative, it was a real challenge to find characters and situations that were interesting.

We made a large part of it during the pandemic and before that time, I didn’t even realise that we would have to cast different actors for every new episode every single week. We wanted good actors, and it all turned out to be a major scheduling nightmare. We had a very limited budget on top of that and that left no margin for error. That we managed to pull off 15 episodes within so many constraints is a miracle for me. It could have collapsed 10 different times, like really fallen apart, and it didn’t. I would just say we got lucky, but it’s true that I held my breath many, many times (smiles).

You are just being very modest...

No, I am being very honest! (Laughs)

Earlier on in this interview, you spoke about karmic justice. How relevant is Accused in the context of present-day society where social media has made the dispensation of ‘justice’ instant and where kangaroo courts abound and outrage is just a tweet away....

What you just said gave me the chills because this is the centre of why I did this show. The very centre of it! You actually just told me exactly how I pitched this show to the network (smiles). I told them that we are living at a time now where we have lost our minds and where we have lost the opportunity to talk and negotiate. We have forgotten to stand and appreciate the beauty and compexity of life. We now want to kill everybody around without even knowing the facts.

We talk about knowing the truth but no one is in possession of the truth. This is happening in politics and in culture and it’s concerning to me that the world is going in this direction. In a small way, this is an opportunity for me to tell these stories which I hope will make people experience some empathy, at least in the moment.