Netflix's first Brazilian legal drama drops on 23 September. All eight episodes at once
Habeas Corpus follows a criminal review group trying to overturn a wrongful conviction, with Marjorie Estiano and Any Gabrielly leading and the Innocence Project Brasil behind the premise.
There is an organisation in Brazil that does something distinctly untelevisual: it rereads old case files looking for convictions that should never have happened. It is called the Innocence Project Brasil, and it is where Netflix’s new series begins.
Habeas Corpus arrives on 23 September with all eight episodes released at once. It is the first scripted legal drama Netflix has made in Brazil, which explains a fair share of the attention. The country has a deep bench of crime and police series and almost nothing set in a courtroom.
The story
Marjorie Estiano plays Inez, a respected law professor running a criminal review group determined to prove the innocence of a young man convicted of a crime he says he did not commit. Any Gabrielly is Marina, the group’s sharpest student, who has attached herself to Inez with a motive she has told nobody about: an old injustice that cut through her own family.
From there it runs on two levels at once, the case itself and whatever each person in the room is actually trying to settle. Nicolas Lee, Felipe Ricca, Pedro Roza and Luiza Gabus fill out the student group, with Naruna Costa, Paula Cohen, Renata Gaspar and Tato Gabus Mendes in the wider cast.
Who made it
Luiz Villaça directs and created the series with Leonardo Moreira and Donna Oliveira. Villaça splits episode duties with Flávia Lacerda, and Moreira wrote the final scripts. Café Royal produces, the same outfit behind the feature 45 do Segundo Tempo.
For anyone watching the catalogue from Portugal, this lands in a year of heavy Portuguese-language investment. August closed with the finale of One Hundred Years of Solitude and a stack of titles leaving. September runs the other way, and one of the arrivals is in Portuguese.
By Lucy Bennett
Image: Julia Maturana / Netflix
