ABC's For Life has a very compelling story, but it tries too hard to tell it in a complicated way

The Hollywood Reporter

The legal drama about a prison inmate who becomes lawyer, from 50 Cent and Hank Steinberg, is loosely based on the story of Isaac Wright Jr., who used the system that framed him to fight injustice. "Throughout ABC's new legal drama For Life, people are constantly telling Aaron Wallace (Nicholas Pinnock) to slow down, not to take such big risks or go to such extremes," says Daniel Fienberg. "It's a warning one might direct at For Life as well, as it layers one seemingly superfluous wrinkle or complication after another on top of what is already a very busy, twisty series. The challenge for creator Hank Steinberg: The series is inspired by the life of Isaac Wright Jr. and when you read the details of Wright's unjust incarceration and subsequent exoneration, the reality also went several twists beyond what anybody would find plausible — so it's a tough standard. That, of course, doesn't mean that For Life — which carefully emphasizes that even if Wright is its inspiration, 'the story, including all characters, events, incidents portrayed, scenes, and dialogue, is fictitious' — couldn't handle certain of its dramatically outsized elements with more fluidity to match other more successful parts of the story."

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• For Life handles its big moments of inspiration and melodrama with restraint and finesse
• For Life has a genuinely interesting story at its heart, but it's buried under a fair amount of frenetic drama that tends to obscure its most interesting ideas
• Meet Isaac Wright Jr., For Life's inspiration, who became an attorney behind bars who helped other inmates: "The act of representing these other prisoners who were also wronged was a part of me fighting them back and getting them back for what they had done to me,” says Wright. “And so all of those victories, they represented something really, really, really important to me.”
• British actor Nicholas Pinnock on filming For Life in Sing-Sing prison: "Oppressive," he says of the location. "The air is thicker. You definitely feel a sense of restriction and confinement. We just worked in the outside yard. We could hear the prisoners at play. I managed to watch them playing basketball. There was one day when we were filming and they were banging on the doors and shouting and trying to cause disruption."
• 50 Cent on finding out about Isaac Wright Jr.: “I look at producing like finding the most significant stories, and then you come to a point where the facts are better than fiction,” he says. “For this, it wasn’t just the saying ‘one in a million.’ He really is just the only one.”