Erin Brockovich is a real person, but she’s also a great movie character, as played by Julia Roberts in Steven Soderbergh’s acclaimed 2000 film of the same name. Billed as “inspired by the life of Erin Brockovich today,” the new ABC series Rebel gives its lead character a new name, but she’s clearly meant to be a continuation of the character that won Roberts an Oscar 20 years ago.
Annie Flynn Rae Bello (Katey Sagal), known as Rebel to her friends and colleagues, has nothing on Roberts’ version of Erin Brockovich, the brash single mother in loud outfits who used her outspoken bluntness to spearhead a class-action lawsuit against a California utility company. The real Brockovich did that, too, and then used the attention she gained from that case and the movie to launch a long-running career as an environmental activist and consultant.
That’s the version of Brockovich that Sagal is playing in Rebel, an older but not necessarily wiser woman who gets recognized on the street by strangers, has written best-selling books and can command the attention of fellow activists, corporate leaders and high-powered attorneys. Rebel isn’t struggling to make ends meet; her fancy Southern California home even includes a guest house. But she is a pushy know-it-all, and even if she’s right about a medical company’s faulty heart valve damaging patients’ immune systems (the ongoing storyline for Rebel’s first season), she’s so smug and condescending about it that viewers might be tempted to side with the greedy corporation.
In 2000, Roberts’ Erin was a struggling mother of three young children, but Rebel’s kids are all grown, and she ropes them all into helping her with her various crusades. Rebel’s son Nate (Kevin Zegers) is a gynecologist enlisted to help Rebel run a medical study on heart valve patients. Her daughter Cassidy (Lex Scott Davis) is a junior lawyer at the same firm where she works as a consultant, run by her old friend Julian Cruz (Andy Garcia). And Rebel’s teenage daughter Ziggie (Runaways’ Ariela Barer) is an intern in Cruz’s law office while she takes some time away from school to recover from opioid addiction.
Add in Rebel’s ex-cop best friend and law firm colleague Lana (Tamala Jones), plus all three of Rebel’s husbands (two exes, one current), and Rebel is far more of an ensemble drama than the Roberts-focused movie. That makes sense coming from creator Krista Vernoff, the showrunner on successful ABC ensemble dramas Grey’s Anatomy and Station 19. Rebel also devotes substantial time to soapy relationship subplots for most of the characters, including potential love interests for Rebel’s three kids.
Rebel herself is such a big personality, though, that the creators have trouble making any of the other characters seem nearly as relevant. Sagal gives a very broad performance, channeling a bit of her old Married … With Children character Peg Bundy in Rebel’s big hair, rock T-shirts and refusal to take no for an answer. At the same time, Rebel’s storylines are basic legal-drama stuff, and the two episodes available for review feature self-contained cases alongside the ongoing storyline about the battle with the medical company.
In the first episode, Rebel helps a woman leave her abusive boyfriend, and in the second episode, she defends a college professor from a student falsely accusing him of assault. In both instances, she wins by essentially browbeating her opponents into submission with arrogant speeches. Rebel threatens to make their lives hell with her own brand of harassment (via the legal system and the media), and they back off, without her having made any substantive progress. Presumably, she won’t be able to win her major corporate lawsuit in the same way, but it makes her seem like a bully rather than a crusader.
Part of the fascination of the case in Erin Brockovich was its basis in fact, but Rebel deals instead in fictional cases, and the heart valve lawsuit is a pretty flimsy storyline to support an entire season. Vernoff adds emotional connections to the case, by emphasizing the sob stories of the plaintiffs (including Mary McDonnell as an absurdly saintly sufferer) and giving Cruz a personal stake in the outcome, but it feels as manipulative and phony as Rebel’s grandstanding speeches.
If Rebel weren’t based on a real person, she’d come off as a silly fictional professional with a job that only exists on TV. As it is, this badass version of the character often feels like wish fulfillment for the real Brockovich (an executive producer), whose current life cannot possibly be this eventful. The supporting characters are a bit more grounded, but most of the other actors get very little breathing room around Sagal’s outsize presence. Only Garcia makes a real impression, bringing some seriousness to the heavy emotional burdens that his character is saddled with.
“She’s not a lawyer, she’s just loud,” says a random background character about the titular character in the first episode, and that seems to be Rebel’s core concept and selling point. But TV lawyers are already loud enough, and Rebel’s willingness to shout over them doesn’t make her more interesting.
Starring Katey Sagal, John Corbett, James Lesure, Lex Scott Davis, Tamala Jones, Ariela Barer, Kevin Zegers, Sam Palladio and Andy Garcia, Rebel premieres Thursday, April 8 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on ABC.