A bizarre cross between reality TV and fictional drama, this "You the Jury" contrivance presented a fictionalised murder put before a real life ex-judge, defending and prosecuting counsel and twelve jury members drawn from the public at large.
Spread over five nights, it came to a conclusion in the final episode with the judgement of the jury and finally a depiction of the events as they "really" occurred.
As someone who's never been on a jury myself, I found some of the procedural aspects to be of interest but the constant straining of a writer's fiction with the real-life cogitations of the jury members for me produced an inconclusive outcome. I do believe that most murders, especially of the domestic kind, are pretty open and shut, but here the introduction of a credible alternative killer who conveniently has no alibi seemed very contrived and almost bound to create the outcome seen at the end.
I found the speechifying of the public jury to be tiresome and gratuitous at times as each of them seeks to impose their version of the truth on their fellow jurors. I also wasn't too interested in the points-scoring of the opposing counsels, with the whole thing in the end feeling artificial. The extended reveal of the "actual" events in the aftermath of the decision could just as easily have been twisted to give a different version of events leading to an inescapable feeling of manipulation particularly with the use of background music, unusual camera set-ups and other recognisable TV directorial traits where no one swears or fluffs their lines and everyone walks into shot at just the right time, almost as if they'd been cued up. It wasn't hard to imagine the vox-poppers rehearsing their speeches or re-taking them for best effect with the strange outcome that the actors playing the fictionalised parts seemed more real than their true-life overseers. And where was the police testimony or scientific evidence, both palpably absent from the case? DNA, the greatest criminology discovery of recent times hardly gets a look-in.
Like a strange collision between "The Thin Blue Line" and "Twelve Angry Men", this show would have you think it was pushing back barriers but in the end it was just another gimmicky crime drama which struggled to fully satisfy or educate its audience as it wished to do.
