A tangled web - the plot and characters of American Crime

Continuing to watch the ABC series American Crime with great interest, even though, yes, it's a bit cheesy and predetermined and, no, I can't really buy into the central relations between Carter (black petty drug dealer and addict charged with murder) and Aubrey (white drug addict potential charged with assault and pressured into testifying against boyfriend Carter - pressure that she resists, at least for now. Friend Bruce D.S. noted to me that every character (with exception of racists and bitter divorcee Felicity Huffman) started as a cliche and then gradually defied our expectations and changed, in some manner. Not sure I completely agree there, but I do think the plotting without stretching credibility and without becoming unduly complex or coincidental - as in movies such as Crash or Traffic - brings into confluence and conflict a wide range of characters in the small city of Modesto, aside from those mentioned there are the parents of the woman assaulted and raped, particularly the odious and self-righteous father, the father of the murder victim, a sweet and insecure reformed gambler and alcoholic played well by Timothy Hutton, probably the only character in the series willing and able to recognize that his child was a total screw-up and that he may bear some of the blame, the Mexican-American car mechanic struggling to get along who is in constant conflict with his two teenage children, and in particular his son, a kids with very likely some learning disabilities who to drawn into petty thuggery in part because of his own innocence and yearning for friendship and companionship - and this just to name a few of the characters. At the center is the murder of a drug dealer, and it's quite surprising yet also quite believable how many people are drawn into the net of this crime - either as suspects, victims, activists, family members of the dead and the accused, witnesses, and so on - the only people about whom we learn and see very little are the lawyers and prosecutors, though we may be soon to learn more about the team hired to defend Carter - hired by his sister who believes her brother has been profiled and abused because he's black who's become active in the local Muslim community so we can see on the horizon some nasty and explosive confrontations.