Annalise Keating (Oscar winner Viola Davis) is everything you'd want your criminal law professor to be — charismatic, brilliant, passionate. But she's also everything you'd never expect — glamorous, unpredictable, sexy, and dangerous. As bold and daring in the courtroom as she is in the classroom, she's a defense attorney who's made her career representing the most hardened, violent criminals — people who've committed everything from fraud to arson to murder — and she does damn near anything possible to win their freedom. At first glance she looks like she has it all — a great career, a loving husband, Sam (Tom Verica)... but her relationship with a local Philadelphia detective, Nate (Billy Brown), is forcing her to confront secrets about her life that she never saw coming.
See the How to Get Away
with Murder Show Intro
Each year, she picks a group of her smartest, most promising students to come work at her law firm. They include:
The students all work under two of Annalise's associates: Frank Delfino (Charlie Weber), a local Philly boy made good, and Bonnie Winterbottom (Liza Weil), a sweet, perceptive team-player with a hidden edge.
Early in the first season, Wes has become entangled with his mysterious neighbor, Rebecca (Katie Findlay), after she becomes the prime suspect in the murder of a university coed. Annalise's involvement with Rebecca's case will pose a challenge to her students' values, convictions, and dreams, as she teaches them the dark truth about the law and our justice system. Working for Annalise is the opportunity of a lifetime, one that can change the course of a student's life forever — and that's exactly what happens when they find themselves involved in a murder plot that will threaten the university's foundations.