The first thing the show tells you is that the students are burying a body. How to Get Away with Murder, Peter Nowalk’s 2014 Shondaland thriller, opens mid-panic in the woods and then rewinds months to the Philadelphia lecture hall where criminal law professor Annalise Keating selects five first-years to work at her firm. Each season runs the same devilish clock, a flash-forward crime revealed in fragments while the timeline crawls toward it, and the question is never just whodunit but how these particular people talked themselves into it. Murder, the show argues, is mostly a group project.
Audience history with the series follows the Shondaland arc at higher voltage. The first seasons were received as addiction in broadcast form, their mid-season reveals, who’s under the sheet, who’s holding the trophy, treated as national events, and Davis’s 2015 Emmy, the first for a Black woman in lead drama actress, stands as the show’s defining moment. From roughly the midpoint on, consensus describes twist fatigue setting in hard, seasons structured around ever-larger conspiracies and body counts that numbed the shock apparatus. What never fatigued anyone, in six years of episodes, is the lead performance, routinely described as too good for the show carrying it.
Viola Davis Removes the Wig
One scene in season one became the show’s mission statement. Alone at her vanity, Annalise removes her wig, then her lashes, then her makeup, stripping the courtroom armor down to the bare face beneath before confronting her husband, and viewers recognized instantly that broadcast television had rarely allowed a Black woman this kind of unguarded interiority. Davis built Annalise as a full contradiction, a genius litigator who lies to everyone including herself, an abuse survivor self-medicating with vodka and control, a mentor who both protects and consumes her students, and the performance swings from lecture-hall command to fetal-position collapse without ever losing the through-line. Community discussions of the show, positive and negative alike, orbit her the way the plot does. Whatever else decayed, the center held.
Around her, the machinery at its best was ferociously effective. The flash-forward structure gamified viewing, every episode dealing new fragments, a corpse’s identity here, a bloodied trophy there, and the mid-season reveals rewarded theory-crafting with real payoffs. The Keating Five, mama’s-boy Wes, polished Michaela, ruthless Connor, wounded Laurel, entitled Asher, plus Charlie Weber’s loyal Frank and Liza Weil’s brittle Bonnie, gave the cover-ups an ensemble of escalating complicity, ordinary ambition curdling into criminal expertise one panicked decision at a time. Standout arcs, the first season’s Sam mystery, a devastating mid-series death that reshuffled the show’s core, and Annalise’s late-series class-action against the system itself, kept even the skeptical enrolled.
And the show’s representation record deserves its own file. Beyond Davis’s landmark, the series normalized queer intimacy on network TV with rare frankness, made an HIV-positive character’s health a lived fact rather than a Very Special Episode, and treated addiction and mental illness with continuing-story seriousness inside a pulp thriller. Plenty of viewers stayed for those threads as much as the mysteries.
The Twist Economy Hyperinflates
Its core problem is arithmetic. A series that spends a corpse and a conspiracy per season needs perpetually escalating supply, and by the middle years the murders, frame-jobs, and secret relatives were compounding past emotional processing, with each finale’s revelation mortgaging the next season’s logic. Viewers describe the sensation precisely, shocks that once landed as gasps arriving as spreadsheet updates, character behavior reverse-engineered from twist requirements, and a back half where nobody could plausibly attend law school class given their weekly felony schedule. The season-long flash-forward device, thrilling twice, became a formula the audience could see loading.
Attrition costs accumulated too. Key cast exits hollowed the ensemble’s emotional ledger, the students’ moral descents eventually left some viewers with no one to root for, and the final season’s rush to resolve a decade of secrets produced a finale consensus rates as heartfelt in its Annalise material and hasty in nearly everything else. A recurring refrain in fan retrospectives holds that the show contained about four seasons of story performed at six seasons’ length.
None of which dislodged the loyalty entirely, and therein lies the show’s oddity, an audience that complained continuously and finished anyway, held by a performance functioning as its own genre.
A Thriller That Was Secretly a Character Study
Squint past the corpses and the show’s real project comes into focus. Every season’s mystery machinery exists to apply pressure to one question, what made Annalise Keating, and the flashback engine that dispenses plot also excavates her, the childhood trauma, the marriage’s compromises, the ambition taxed at rates her white colleagues never paid. Her students’ corruptions are variations on the theme, the show’s grim thesis being that institutions teach exactly what its title promises, and the finale’s framing, a eulogy, a legacy, a full-circle lecture hall, confirms the series was always Annalise’s biography wearing a thriller’s trench coat. That’s why the performance and the show can’t be rated separately. She wasn’t elevating the material. She was the material.
Should You Watch How to Get Away with Murder?
Watch it for Davis, full stop, and for two or three opening seasons of elite-grade network addiction with a landmark performance at the center. It’s a superb binge precisely because the cliffhanger engine was built for exactly that consumption.
Skip it, or budget your exit, if twist inflation and character whiplash across long seasons wear you down, with the common fan checkpoint falling somewhere in the middle years. The immunity deal expires. Davis’s testimony never does.
The Verdict on How to Get Away with Murder
How to Get Away with Murder is a pulp thriller elevated into television history by the best weekly acting of its broadcast era. Davis’s Annalise Keating stands among the medium’s great characters, the wig scene alone rewired what network drama permitted, and the early flash-forward seasons remain machine-tooled addiction. The back half spends shocks like a collapsing currency and the ledger shows it. Court adjourns with a split ruling, a 3.7 for the series, an unqualified landmark for its lead, and a strong recommendation to enroll for at least the first two semesters.