'Your Honor' with Bryan Cranston is a 'Breaking Bad' retread

In “Your Honor,” a new limited series premiering Sunday on Showtime and adapted by British screenwriter Peter Moffat from an Israeli original, Bryan Cranston plays Michael Desiato, a New Orleans judge protecting his teenage son Adam after a hit-and-run accident. One problem with this premise — let’s say “one aspect,” since not everyone would consider it a problem, and some will find it just their cup of bitter tea — is that once the plot is set in motion, you are mostly waiting around for whatever bad stuff is going to happen to whomever it’s going to happen to. To the extent you can root for him, and for Adam — a sensitive budding photographer carried along in his father’s stratagems — you can only hope for them not to get caught, or killed; there is no reason to think they’ll ever be “OK.” It’s easier to root for Michael, certainly, than it was for that little old meth-maker Walt, a self-pitying narcissist who found joy in acting the criminal hard guy. In fact, the only characters whose fates really concerned me were the innocent, or relatively innocent, bystanders, caught up in Michael’s schemes and fixes, most notably “affiliated” street kid Kofi, but also old friend Charlie, a mayoral candidate, and former protégé Lee, a public defender turned big-time attorney.