It is a common trope in American legal dramas to have young, idealistic attorneys fight on behalf of their down-on-luck, falsely imprisoned clients. People who the system and often their own families have written off. The Practice , Boston Legal , Suits , Ally McBeal et al had their own variant on this trope through the ’90s and 2000s.
In a similar vein, the central deceit in the AMC drama For Life , which premiered its second season in India recently, is that the lawyer and the falsely-imprisoned man are the same character. Aaron Wallace (Nicholas Pinnock) was wrongly convicted of running a drugs ring, seven years before we pick up the story. Through hard work and the support of compassionate prison warden Safiya Masry ( Game of Thrones ’ Indira Varma), he gets a law degree while behind bars. Soon, he’s fighting on behalf of his fellow inmates, trying to get their convictions overturned or sentences commuted, all while gathering enough evidence to flip his own case, and get back at the vengeful, politically-ambitious District Attorney Glen Maskins (Boris McGiver from The Wire , House of Cards ).
A still from For Life, Season 2
Prepping with Wright Jr
Produced by hip-hop star Curtis ‘50 Cent’ Jackson, who also appears as Wallace’s fellow inmate during the first season, For Life is loosely based on the real-life New Jersey lawyer Isaac Wright Jr, who Pinnock spent a lot of time with in order to prepare for the role.
“It is a huge responsibility. I was lucky to have Isaac Wright by my side whenever I needed him. I wasn’t doing a gesture-by-gesture recreation of him, but I knew that we had to capture the essence of his personality,” says Pinnock, addressing the challenges of portraying a semi-fictional character like Aaron Wallace in an interview ahead of the première last month.
“You have to understand, this [my case] happened in the ’90s, when there was no social media and they [the authorities] were just annihilating minorities with impunity,” says Wright Jr. “This was a time when a police officer could take the stand and say that the sun was blue and the jury would believe them. So when you consider all of that, you realise the enormity of what Aaron does in this show, what I did in the 90s.”
A still from For Life, Season 2
Freedom ties
Wallace faces a new kind of challenge in the second season — by the end of the first episode we finally see him walking out of prison a free man. But this also means reconnecting with his family; his wife Marie (Joy Bryant) is now in a relationship with his friend Darius (Brandon J Dirden).
“I think the weight of everything that happened last season, across seven years in his life, is still very much on his shoulders,” says Pinnock, adding, “Even before we finished filming the earlier season we knew that we wanted the second chapter to be about his new life as a liberated man. He’s had to adapt to life outside as a husband and as a father, and that process has brought along a new weight of its own.”
For Life is visually impressive (especially the prison sequences), boasts fantastic performances across the board, and maintains a steady pace throughout the narrative. Whether the now-liberated Wallace’s story keeps up the momentum of Season 1 remains to be seen, but the initial signs are encouraging. There’s a very different vulnerability on Wallace’s face, now that he realises that life outside prison isn’t the perfect picture he’d imagined for years. Hopefully, by the end of this season, we’ll see him fully reconciled to the changed realities of his personal and professional lives. “We’re looking for ways in which he can react to the realities of a post-Covid world, too,” Pinnock adds. “But it is too early to say what that’ll look like.”
For Life is now streaming on Sony LIV.
