By Chris Ryall
June 3, 2004
Well, the show has an interesting premise, I'll give it that. And based on the pilot episode, that's all I'll give it.
Fox's new show THE JURY, debuting next Tuesday, has a nice pedigree behind it, too. It's brought to us by Barry Levinson and HOMICIDE's Tom Fontana and James Yoshimura. But it's set in New York, which is evidently all wrong for hardcore Baltimorian Levinson. Something went wrong, anyway.
The premise is that each week, twelve jurors are asked to piece together a trial and then make their decision. Throughout the trial, we hear evidence, see flashback snippets and then get to hear their deliberations. And the hook to the show is that, after their verdict has been delivered, we the audience are treated to seeing a final flashback so we can see if they made the correct decision.
The show promises "gritty," "atmospheric" flashbacks, which pretty much means quick cuts and jerky camerawork. It also offers up some of the most TV-ready, false-ringing dialogue I've seen in a "serious" drama in some time. the jurors never seem like anything other than bad actors reading bad dialogue. The tension between some of them is almost laughable at times.
In the pilot, the jury hears a case about a New Year's Eve celebration where three punks throwing fireworks off a roof and firing guns accidentally kill a teenager while he's asleep in his bed across the alleyway. The boys are Hispanic, and when one of the jurors isn't convinced of his guilt, another woman asks her if it's because she's also Hispanic and is protecting her own. Of course, the woman asking the question appears to be a dark-skinned, possibly Hispanic, woman, and the person she's grilling is as fair-skinned as my Irish ass. But the important thing is this--the show has already played the obvious "race card," in this, its premiere episode. I would say it has nowhere else to go but down if it wasn't already such a bottom-dwelling show.
You want another example of bad dialogue? The prosecutors (or maybe the defense. Doesn't really matter and I'd already lost too much interest to rewind and see which one) are talking about mortal sin. "Mortal sin?" one asks. "Yeah, you know, kind of like being a Red Sox fan living here." Yeah, you know, kind of like dialogue no real person would ever speak.
I suppose some of the prosectors and defenders on this show will be regulars, but since the jury members are the primary part of the show, and there's just not enough time or clever dialogue to let us get to know any of them to care about them, well, there's no one to root for. Meaning the only reason you'd watch this show is to see if the court case turns out like you thought it would, to see if the jury makes the right decision (I stopped expecting this around 1994). But so far, the case was so trite, the evidence so tedious, that I didn't care about the outcome one way or the other. Subsequent episodes are going to have to try a lot harder to change that opinion.
Fox's THE JURY debuts on Tuesday, June 8 at 8:00 PM.
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