‘Reasonable Doubt’ Stars Tease Season 2’s Case, Morris Chestnut’s Arrival & More (VIDEO)

Reasonable Doubt is back and keeping viewers on their toes as Jax Stewart (Emayatzy Corinealdi) takes on her friend Shanelle Tucker’s (Shannon Kane) self-defense case after she supposedly bludgeoned her abusive husband JT (Christopher Mychael Watson) to death. But Jax isn’t doing it alone as a new face to the firm, Corey Cash (Morris Chestnut) joins the team.

Along with navigating a new professional dynamic in the wake of this addition, Jax is still working on her marriage to Lewis (McKinley Freeman), and trying to cope with the traumas inflicted on her in Season 1 at the hands of Damon (Michael Ealy). It isn’t an easy journey as Jax barely has time to accept the things that have happened recently before she’s focused on trying to defend her friend Shanelle.

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“They have just a bit of a tenuous relationship at times,” Corinealdi notes of Jax and Shanelle’s friendship, which was rocky even in Season 1. “There’s always those little things. And so I think that Raamla Mohamed [our showrunner] has set up this story in this way where it would be the friend that you have the most tension with at times, who is at this point of need,” Corinealdi adds. “And it also happens that it’s at Jax’s lowest time.”

Part of that struggle is coming to terms with the abuse Shanelle faced in her marriage with JT. “In Season 2 there’s a whole different type of trauma that we’re dealing with… It’s abuse that kind of hides in plain sight and that abuse when it’s close to home,” executive producer Larry Wilmore shares. “Jax is one of her best friends, one of the Ladera ladies. How’s she going to manage her friendship professionally, her own relationship with what she’s just gone through? It’s going to affect Jax so many different levels,” Wilmore adds.

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As mentioned above, time doesn’t stop for Jax and as Corinealdi puts it, “Jax is defined by her ability to keep the train moving, and so the train is not moving as quickly and it’s kind of diverted to a different track. And so she’s struggling with that. And it’s great that we get to see how that plays out in real-time for her and her world and how it’s affecting everything and making her question her own judgment at times.”

“But you’re going to see this season is a lot about healing and repairing while the world is going crazy,” Wilmore adds.

While Jax is struggling with her mental health in relation to her own traumas outside of Shanelle, she does return to her colleagues Krystal (Angela Grovey) and Daniel (Tim Jo) with optimism that she can win her friend’s case, being the one to recruit Corey herself. As for how the workplace dynamic is shifting, Grovey says, “I think [Krystal and Daniel] tend to act first, ask questions later when it comes to Jax. So I think we are cautious around her coming back because something so traumatic happened to her at the end of Season 1 that I feel like our characters really sort of tiptoe around Jax’s coming back.”

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For Jo, he sees Corey’s arrival as a good thing for Daniel. “Corey Cash laughs at my jokes. Corey Cash thinks I’m cool. So Daniel,… he’s like, ‘Finally, we get some male energy to match my male alpha energy. Someone’s got my back.’” Not that Jax didn’t have his back.

“The fact that he’s joining the firm… and we know where Jax is mentally… We know that that’s going to be a challenge because Jax is not going to just let anyone come and unseat her in any kind of way, but at the same time, she’s not fully herself,” Corinealdi acknowledges of Jax’s struggles as Corey joins the firm. “So that is going to inherently just present a particular challenge for her.”

Meanwhile, at home, Jax and Lewis are picking up the pieces of their weathered relationship. “I think a lot of it starts with trying to figure out where they are,” Freeman says. “It’s also reconciling where Lewis is honestly present and where he might be in positions where he’s maybe fighting an idea that he created. And how does that reconcile in terms of trying to repair this relationship and at the same time still be a father to my kids and being present professionally at the job? So there’s a lot going on.”

Wilmore echoes this, noting, “It’s a bit of a roller coaster. It’s a bit of a roller coaster. And if you saw Season 1, you understand why there’s a lot to repair in this relationship.”

Stay tuned to see how Jax deals with all these challenges as Reasonable Doubt Season 2 streams on Hulu this fall, and catch the full video interview, above.

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