ABC's highly anticipated new series "How to Get Away With Murder" debuts Thursday and delivers on answering the title question. The thriller television show, created by Pete Nowalk of "Grey's Anatomy" and executive-produced by Shonda Rhimes, stars Viola Davis as Annalise Keating, a criminal-law professor who instructs her students on how to win a case.

"Discredit the witness. Find a new suspect. Bury the evidence," she said in the pilot episode. These rules are even more potent to her pupils as "How to Get Away With Murder" begins with a real murder. Law students are seen arguing over how to conceal the body when the story restarts at the first day of Keating's class.

The group is reintroduced: There's Wes, an overwhelmed transfer student played by Alfred Enoch; Michaela and Asher, know-it-all studiers portrayed by Naomi King and Matt McGorry; and pretty boy Connor and shy Laurel, played by Jack Falahee and Karla Souza.

As everyone seems to settle into their character archetypes, Keating reminds the audience with her lecture on witnesses, "Do you know who anyone really is?"

For the rest of the episode, and presumably the series, that is the question at hand. Davis as Keating is incredibly hard to discern as a "good" or "bad" guy. Her character doesn't fit into neat guilty or not-guilty boxes -- Keating is complex. And while this practice of trying to identify people into binaries to figure out who they are is human nature, "How to Get Away With Murder" wants viewers to trip on their own expectations.

"[The show] wants us to re-evaluate our assumptions about people," Entertainment Weekly critic Melissa Maerz said in her review. "[It] builds suspense with long, silent stares that intimate everyone's guilty of something."

"How to Get Away With Murder" premieres Thursday at 10/9c on ABC.