altariel | Law and Order: UK

I just left this comment in

communicator's post on Law and Order: UK, and since it pretty much sums up what I thought, I'm copying, tweaking, and pasting.

As you know, Bob, I adore Law and Order, and I thought this was a pretty decent stab at it. I felt there weren't quite enough twists in the police story (L&O generally weaves around a hell of a lot in the first 20 minutes) and there was the notorious stock TV scene-ender at one point ("Oh, and [character]?" [character pauses at door and looks back questioningly] "Thanks." [character beams and leaves]) [1].

The legal scenes didn't capture that sense of civic society being constructed and enacted in the court-room (which programmes like L&O and Boston Legal do so well); partly because we, er, don't do that so much in the UK.

mraltariel was saying last night that given the UK court system is about weighing competing narratives, it might work better dramatically to have cutaways as people gave evidence, like in Without a Trace.

[1] As noted in Rusty's The Writer's Tale.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It's true, a lot of Americans are very cynical about jury duty, and approach it primarily from the perspective of personal economics. The process can be long, you get paid minimum wage, and the competitive elimination of jurors by the two attorneys often seems aimed at eliminating thoughtful, intelligent, or just well-educated people from juries, along with anyone who has even an incidental connection with law-enforcement or the legal professions or whose ideological commitments may not make a juror sympathetic to either the prosecution or the defense attorney. I don't know the inner workings of the British jury selection system, but Americans get very worked up over the stupidities in our own selection system and are very worried economically to boot. A lot of people probably wouldn't object if there were professional jurors, because they think at least those people would know something about the law and wouldn't have to worry about their pay checks or the problems of caring for relatives, etc.

Despite the mundane realities of jury duty, with all its irritations, I wouldn't discount the notion that for us, the courtroom is the place where common sense - which is really what a jury is supposed to provide, protection from judgment that comes from the sophisticated heights of an elite society that has lost contact with what happens here on the ground - has its say. We think of the courts as both defenders of the existing law, but also as a place where social injustice or questions of what can count as injustice, can be tested, decided on and given a definite form. Granted, it's not the run-of-the-mill jury trials that serve that function in our consciousness: it's the court case that makes its all the way up to the Supreme Court after having gone through different levels of trial by jury and appeal, that sticks in our minds (Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Furman v. Georgia, and the recent 2000 ruling on the outcome of the presidential election).

U.S.-produced legal shows I think take the reassuring sense of finality and of real social impact and meaningfulness that you get from the Supreme Court cases, and they combine it with the original inspiration to trial by jury as protection from the abuse of knowledge and power under color of law. The connection between that glorified, humane common sense and the degraded sense of who your "peers" are when you get to the selection stage isn't one that gets interrogated on television, as far as I know.

But maybe that's why U.S. legal dramas so often force the defense or prosecution lawyer to carry the indignation of common sense and find ways to get the law to show the rightness of things. The jury's presence in the fictional courtroom is essentially anonymous and symbolic - they hand down a piece of paper that certifies or rejects the lawyer's notion of common sense and rightness. We don't see anything from their perspective, because they would be absolutely unable to carry the legal argumentative side of things, to formulate what's at stake, even if there were a way around the random assignment of juries that prevents making one a major recurring character. Twelve Angry Men is probably the one exception to the cop-and-lawyer-focused legal drama format that I've seen, and that was a once-off, not a series.

Dwim

Absolutely fascinating, thank you. A couple of years ago the BBC produced a semi-dramatized series about a rape trial: the witnesses were actors; the barristers were real lawyers; the jury was made up of twelve public figures. We got footage of the trail, and then the jury's deliberation. Depressing viewing. I gather the actors had several improvization sessions to help them work out their stories, which is something I would have liked to have seen too.

Law and Order: UK

Hmm. American legal dramas and realities

Re: Hmm. American legal dramas and realities