Fox has already gotten people to start
voting
-- can they make us like jury duty, too? That's the central question behind the network's latest offering, The Jury (Tuesdays, 9pm), a heavy-hitting drama with a fancy pedigree. Executive produced by the writers and producers (Tom Fontana, Barry Levinson, James Yoshimoto, and Jim Finnerty) behind influential shows like Oz and Homicide: Life on the Street, the show features a new crime -- and a new jury to chew over that crime -- in every episode.
Unfortunately, we already know those juries and those crimes. The Jury draws on its bipolar salacious/moralizing Fox origins, procedural-show formulas, and the inescapable oeuvre of Jerry Bruckheimer to create a familiar mishmash of a product.
The déjà vu sets in from the opening sequences, when the show introduces its central crime. Filmed with a tired hand-held style, the scenes are edited into a washed-out, blue-tinted blur familiar to anyone who's watched, well, Homicide, Bruckheimer's CSI, or any number of crime shows in the last decade. This type of camerawork is supposed to signify real-life! and edgy!, but mostly feel like they were shot by a drunk and edited by a Cuisinart.
Because the writers haven't spent enough time establishing the particulars of the crime, it's up to the jury to tell the viewers what's going on. So they file in, twelve angry men and women, mostly pissed off at having to be so predictable. There's the weird old biddy, the eccentric in the slouchy hat, the young brown man who's all “street” with his wisdom, the dumb blonde who's making it with the messy-haired boy, the young Latina who will get mad when someone mashes the race button (“I thought it would be hard for you to admit that one of your own kind might be responsible for this tragedy,” some white lady jurist says. “Having a rough life doesn't excuse him. Or you.” Cue explosion.) They sit around, eye each other, get prickly at carefully gauged intervals, and once in a while start gasping away: Cough, cough, retch! And then they hack up an indigestible chunk of exposition like it's a hairball.
The hoary old Creative Writing 101 chestnut about showing and not telling was never more applicable.
The first two episodes draw on the special Fox formula of showing lots of gore and then clucking over it. In the first show, some bad kids were firing off a Glock on New Year's Eve; an innocent teen in the next building dies. The second features a puzzling death: a high-school couple checks into a luxurious hotel suite; the girl dies, the boy doesn't. Did he murder her? or was it a failed double suicide? Those Krazy Kids! I can't wait for Bill O'Reilly to tell me how violent TV is corrupting our youth again.
The Jury is an uncomfortable synthesis of the two dominant themes in modern TV drama: procedural dramas and reality shows. Procedural shows, especially back in the days before Law & Order spawned like soldiers sprung from dragon's teeth, had a comforting heft and predictability to them. Crime, police investigation, jury, verdict. A friend of mine watched nothing but piles of Law & Order reruns when she had mono -- the show was just varied enough to be intriguing and just formulaic enough so as not to tax the brain unduly. (And she wanted to make Detective Brisco (Jerry Orbach) a nice sandwich. The man so clearly needed some nurturing.)
Along came the staged “reality” of reality shows, and dramas were never the same again. 24 has agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) running around in “real-time;” CSI rewards our desire to watch medical-procedure shows with reenactments of poisons eating away at victim's insides and bullets plummeting through lungs. Character development is negligible (although 24 has had some fine moments with its two male leads, Sutherland and Dennis Haysbert) and plot is central, even as the twists and turns became more ludicrous.
The Jury suffers from a distinct lack of solid characters. How can one flesh out a crime, a trial, and jury deliberations, and hope to create three-dimensional personalities for twelve new characters each week? The core cast of lawyers, a cranky judge, and a “comic relief, please” bailiff and court officer pair doesn't sustain interest, either.
Luckily, The Jury's plot doesn't strain incredulity to the breaking point, but merely gives it a good workout. The second episode, in particular, had a poetic something -- like a double love suicide out of a Chikamatsu Monzaemon-penned bunraku, or Japanese puppet play, there was a hopeless romanticism, a gnashing of teeth against forces beyond the lovers' control, and a certain woodenness in the form that kept the whole thing from being insufferably maudlin. There were also a number of sharp little moments that did feel authentic in the second episode -- a shot of one jurist's crazyass doodle, the way the eccentric guy threw down his hat when the old biddy started droning on.
Despite such artistically observed moments, The Jury always cops out at the end. To satisfy viewers' desire to participate in reality-drama making, they let us pointlessly vote in our verdict on cell phones -- we can see if we are “correct” or “incorrect” in our assessments of the case.
Even worse, perhaps, are the last few shots of every episode, where we see what “really” happened in the evening's crime. The creators of the show aren't so insulting as to give us an M. Night Shyamalan wank every single time, fortunately, but do overlay each verdict with enough additional details to give pause. Although this treatment is relatively subtle, the creators missed an opportunity to be truly challenging. What if they had left us not knowing? Left us like the man in the parable in Kafka's great novel The Trial, dying in front of the door of the Law without ever gaining access, or lost in the woods like the characters in Rashomon, with truth told countless, contradictory ways? What a delightful expression of pomo notions of ineffable, untouchable reality that would be -- and one far more convincing than the show's pastiche camera work, which tries to capture the confusing nature of perception with formulaic flash. Sure, the lack of Omnipo-cam would be maddening to viewers at first, but the creators of The Jury want to be edgy, don't they? The jury's still out on this show, but unless the writers act fast -- unless they stop playing peek-a-boo with the “truth” and then spoon-feeding it to us, and craft some exposition instead of making the actors cough it up -- the public's verdict won't be a welcome one.
Noy Thrupkaew is a Prospect senior correspondent.
