For The People – First Innings

By: Dustin Bradley

ABC’s For the People is back for a second season! It’s been a while since we have visited these characters that many of us have grown to love and adore. The second season premiere episode, “First Inning” was a great episode! 

We open with Judge Byrne (Vondie Curtis Hall) hosting a baseball game for our public defenders and prosecutors. We see that the whole gang is back, minus Leonard who took a job in Texas. The game get interrupted pretty quickly when news breaks that a U.S. Senator was shot dead outside of someone home and our lawyers have to go to work.

Our defense is looking over the case with their new investigator, Ted (Charles Michael Davis), when the defendant just walks into the office and claims he’s the one responsible. It turns out that he is indirectly responsible for the shooting seeing as how it was a “swatting.” A “swatting” is when someone either in the gaming community or social media in general call the police and file a false report about something happening and gets the SWAT to show up and scare the people in the home. Our defendant, Julian (Elijah Nelson), did it because of a violent video game and one of his opponents bet. Little did he know the address the opponent gave him was fake and was actually the senators’ son’s house. Sandra (Britt Robertson) take the case immediately and so Jill (Hope Davis) has no choice but to give it to her.

Together they go up against our prosecutors, Roger (Ben Shenkman) and Kate (Susannah Flood). Roger wants to try and hit Julian with as many charges as he can and despite Kate not agreeing with some of them they set off to make a deal with the defense. We end up with a reasonable deal at first…That is until later that night when Roger and Jill get caught up in a swatting themselves at the hands of an internet troll. After this incident Roger pushes for an even riskier “murder-for-hire” charge. Kate immediately disagrees with it but she loses that fight because she’s off the case. Who’s on the case now? Well, guess who’s back in town…Leonard (Regé-Jean Page).

Once again it’s Leonard vs Sandra in the courtroom and they both put up a fair fight. We receive a testimony from experts on video games and the FBI, but none more powerful than the senators own son who witnessed it alongside his child. We get a truly emotional moment that tugs in our hearts and the jury’s too. In the end, Julian is found not guilty for the murder-for-hire, but guilty for all the other charges.

Elsewhere in the episode, Jay (Wesam Keesh) gets a case with an entitled woman named Holiday (Zibby Allen) who lives with her parents and has been so coddled her whole life that she won’t move out and get a life of her own independently. We eventually find out that her parents are the ones turning her in each time hoping that she’ll get convicted and won’t be able to live in their apartment building anymore. In the end, Jay has to talk some sense into them and tries to make sure he never has to deal with them again.

We also get a small storyline about Seth (Ben Rappaport) standing up to Leonard about the office he left behind and how he will not be giving it up because he didn’t just leave. He stayed and he earned it.