A father learns that the law has a price, and that he cannot afford it. That is the engine of The Trial, the Spanish-language series in which Eugenio Derbez sets comedy aside for the coldest role of his career — a man whose teenage daughter accuses a classmate of assault, and who discovers that the accused belongs to a family wealthy enough to treat the justice system as a negotiation.

Known in Spanish as El Juicio, the eight-episode drama arriving on Prime Video is built around a single, deceptively plain question — was there a crime? — and then spends its length refusing to let that question stay plain. It belongs to the class of assault-trial dramas that The Night Of and Anatomy of a Scandal turned into a prestige form, but it moves the template to Mexico, where the gap between a courtroom’s promise and its practice becomes its own kind of suspense. This is a legal drama in the strict sense: most of its weight sits not in the alleged act but in the machinery that surrounds it once an accusation is made.

Opposite Derbez stands Pedro Alonso, the actor whose Berlín made La Casa de Papel a global habit, cast here against a father of a different kind — the patriarch of the accused, a businessman who understands power as something you spend. The series sets the two men as mirror images: two fathers, two sons, two irreconcilable ideas of what protecting a child means, with neither allowed to settle into villain or hero. Derbez has described the design plainly, promising no absolute villains and no absolute heroes, only positions. It is an unusual thing to say about a project built on a crime, and it tells you the series is more interested in the aftermath than the accusation.

That refusal is a writer’s decision before it is a director’s. The Trial was created and written by Daniel Krauze, who shaped Luis Miguel, la serie into a study of a public man’s private wreckage, and who works here from reporting by his brother, the journalist León Krauze. The story did not begin as fiction. León Krauze first brought Derbez the account of a real father caught in a comparable ordeal years ago, and Daniel Krauze built the script after interviewing several survivors, folding their testimony into the narrative. The result is presented not as the dramatization of one court file but as a composite drawn from cases that repeat too often to belong to any single family.

The direction is split among three filmmakers with distinct instincts, and that division is itself an argument. Roberto Sneider, whose Arráncame la vida read Mexican history through an intimate betrayal, brings a novelist’s patience; Belén Macías arrives from a body of work attentive to women pushed to the edge of institutions; and Jorge Michel Grau announced himself with Somos lo que hay, a horror film that was really about a family closing ranks to survive. Handing one case to three directors is a way of insisting that a trial is never seen from a single vantage — that the same event fractures depending on who is looking, and on what they stand to lose.

What keeps The Trial from playing like an imported template in Spanish is its ground. The Mexican specifics are the point: a country where gender-based violence is both an everyday emergency and, inside a courtroom, something that can be slowed, softened, or spent away. The series lives in the distance between the law as written and the law as purchased, and it treats a family’s wealth as a plot mechanism — the resource that converts a daughter’s accusation into a paperwork problem, a scheduling issue, a matter of which lawyer outlasts which. In that framing the businessman is not a cartoon of corruption but the logical endpoint of a system that lets money set the terms.

For Derbez the project is a public break. The comic who built an audience across two languages — from Mexican television to Hollywood comedies — has never carried a drama of this weight, and the industry reading is straightforward: Prime Video is betting that a bilingual marquee name can pull a mass audience toward a subject it usually avoids. The gamble is not only commercial. A star known for making people laugh, asking them instead to sit with the slow humiliation of seeking justice, is a bid to change what an audience expects from him. Whether the performance lands is for the eight episodes to settle; the ambition is not in question.

The series also sits in a specific lineage of Mexican screen storytelling about broken institutions — the tradition of Luis Estrada’s political satires, of documentaries that put the justice system itself in the dock — updated for a streaming era and a global audience. It inherits the international courtroom drama’s grammar and grafts it onto that local root. The tension between the two — a form audiences recognize from English-language prestige television, a reality that is stubbornly, specifically Mexican — is where the show stakes its claim to matter beyond its cast list.

Prime Video’s decision to release all eight episodes at once, across more than 240 territories, is part of the argument too. A binge release invites the audience to treat a trial as one sustained ordeal rather than a weekly ritual, compressing months of legal attrition into a weekend — and it positions The Trial as a flagship of the platform’s expanding Spanish-language slate, a bet that a story rooted in a specific national reality can cross borders without being sanded into something generic.

The question The Trial keeps open is the one no verdict can close. If the father wins — if the system, for once, does its job — he has still spent himself to get there, and the young woman at the center has still been made to relive the worst day of her life in a room full of strangers deciding whether to believe her. A courtroom does not repair what it adjudicates; it ranks it, files it, and moves on. The series appears to know this, and to build its final movement around it. It asks what justice costs the people who finally receive it, and whether a price that high can still be called justice at all.

The Trial — El Juicio — premieres Friday, September 11, 2026, with all eight episodes streaming at once on Prime Video worldwide. It is a fiction inspired by real Mexican cases rather than a retelling of one, and it addresses sexual violence, class, and impunity as its central subjects. Alongside Derbez and Pedro Alonso, the cast includes Karla Gaytán, Íker Sánchez Solano and Sergio Gava. The series was produced by Derbez’s 3Pas Studios with Visceral and Reclaim Entertainment, and filmed in Puebla, Mexico.

Cast

Photos: The Movie Database (TMDB)

Tags: Prime Video, Pedro Alonso, Eugenio Derbez, The Trial, El Juicio

The Trial on Prime Video: Eugenio Derbez fights a family rich enough to bury his daughter’s case

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