You Don’t Know Me Review 2022 Tv Show Series Season Cast Crew Online

Hero (Samuel Adewunmi), on trial for shooting and killing a South London drug dealer named Jamil Issa (Roger Nsengiyumva), hears that closing statement from the prosecutor. Then the judge informs the jury that Hero, who did not testify on his own behalf, has dismissed his barrister and will make his closing statement himself. Hero starts that closing statement by saying that he didn’t do what is likely going to send him to prison, and he tells his side of the story.

In flashback we see Hero, who sells luxury cars, having the confrontation with Jamil that the prosecutor says led to the shooting. Jamil invokes the name of a woman named Kyra (Sophie Wilde), which angers Hero. In order to explain why, Hero talks to the jury about how they met and how their relationship progressed… until she disappeared from her flat and stopped taking his calls.

As the weeks go by, he becomes desperate to find her, as are his mother Adebi (Yetunde Oduwole) and sister Bless (Bukky Bakray), who see that this is tearing Hero up. One of his social media pleas comes back with a lead in the Camden neighborhood in North London; he is devastated to find Kyra getting into the car of a stranger; this beautiful, book-reading woman he is in love with is working as a prostitute. After a period of depression, Bless convinces him that he should try to save Kyra from whatever situation she’s in. He appeals to Jamil for help, and Jamil hooks him up with someone who can get him a gun.

You Don’t Know Me is a pretty smart crime show told in a way that feels completely unnecessary. Written by Tom Edge based on the novel by Imran Mahmood and directed by Sarmad Masud, the show basically uses Hero’s closing statement as the framework to build the story of just how Hero got to the point where he’s making his own closing statement in hopes it keeps him out of prison for life.

That framework may have worked well in the novel, but in the four-part series, it just serves to give Hero an audience, with the judge occasionally admonishing either Hero or the jury that none of what he’s presenting should be considered new evidence. But it’s pretty obvious that none of what he’s presenting, especially the story about how he met Kyra and how they built their relationship, would ever be allowed in a real closing argument. Every time we get involved in the actual story, and then we go back to the courtroom setting, that notion pops back into our heads, and it becomes a distraction.

But that doesn’t mean we didn’t think Adewunmi’s performance in those courtroom scenes wasn’t engaging; he does a good job of showing Hero’s barely contained anger at being in this spot. And we did really enjoy the scenes that illustrated the story that Hero was telling the jury; we felt the chemistry between Adewunmi and Wilde as Hero and Kyra built their relationship from a chance bus encounter to something real and joyous. Nsengiyumva has the right amount of menace to play Jamil, and we were also taken by the warmth Oduwole and Bakray used to play Hero’s tough but loving mother and sister.

We’re not quite sure how the story is going to progress by the end of the first episode, which is always a good thing to experience while watching shows like this. We just wish that the storytelling didn’t revolve around a framework that — at least in the first episode — feels more like a gimmick than creative story structure.