Thanks to The Juryist for the heads up.
The pilot works a bit like a conceptual episode of soon gone The Good Wife, only told from the jury’s perspective. Except it’s not a one-shot but the whole concept of the show. It even starts like a lot of episodes of The Good Wife with a video took from a phone broadcasted in front of the jurors, one where the not yet dead victim is sadistically aussaulted by a group of cruel teenagers -friends?- in the woods, only to discover in the end of the sequence that she’s consenting, it’s roleplay. But she died a few hours later nonetheless. Glaucous, isn’t it? The prosecutors in the story are not that important. They do their job when we’re in the middle of a courtroom scene -and there are a few- but their speeches are pretty harmless. What the writers are focused on is the 12 jurors we meet along the way. 12 it’s the law but it’s a lot for a TV show. It takes time to learn their first names and understand who they are in a nutshell. They try to avoid caricatures but they don’t always succeed. You have the nerdy IT guy, the southern material belle, the angry old lady, the hipster artist, the middle-class working mom… The goal now is to deepen the characters since, as I understand it, every episode will be centered on one of them through flashbacks from their personal life, explaining how the case reflects upon their own story. It means 12 episodes plus a 13th for the verdict. And it also means quality will vary depending on the interest we have for a character. Some of them don’t seem that interesting actually. The ongoing trial and the new informations we will learn along the way should keep us entertained though. They didn’t choose a spectacular case for nothing.
The structure of the episode is quite complex. We jump all the time from the trial to the delibaration room, where the jury is poised to spend hours, from past to present with some scenes happening during the investigation, while we’re focusing on the juror Kim Dempsey, played by the phenomenal Archie Panjabi, through flashbacks. It means a lot of Archie in the pilot, but less in the subsequent episodes even if she comes out as a leader in the jurors team. You’ve been warned. Kim doesn’t seem that different from Kalinda. She’s a strong woman obsessed with seeking the truth, not there to make friends so she can look like she’s cold sometimes, and a bit provactive. In fact, she was at the center of a sex scandal a few months ago that kind of ruined her career. She is a domestic abuse crusader and everyone saw her having rough sex with her boyfriend in her young years with a video that leaked online. We’re offered a crispy glimpse of it where she begs him to hit her, harder and harder until it makes her leap bleed. She even licks her own blood while moaning. That’s certainly something Kalinda could have done (but not CBS). Told you it was glaucous. It’s not just the murder case. It’s the whole atmosphere. Are people ready for this? But don’t be afraid, the writers also give us some breathing space when the characters are debating, joking around a bit, irritating each others…
The structure of the episode is quite complex. We jump all the time from the trial to the delibaration room, where the jury is poised to spend hours, from past to present with some scenes happening during the investigation, while we’re focusing on the juror Kim Dempsey, played by the phenomenal Archie Panjabi, through flashbacks. It means a lot of Archie in the pilot, but less in the subsequent episodes even if she comes out as a leader in the jurors team. You’ve been warned. Kim doesn’t seem that different from Kalinda. She’s a strong woman obsessed with seeking the truth, not there to make friends so she can look like she’s cold sometimes, and a bit provactive. In fact, she was at the center of a sex scandal a few months ago that kind of ruined her career. She is a domestic abuse crusader and everyone saw her having rough sex with her boyfriend in her young years with a video that leaked online. We’re offered a crispy glimpse of it where she begs him to hit her, harder and harder until it makes her leap bleed. She even licks her own blood while moaning. That’s certainly something Kalinda could have done (but not CBS). Told you it was glaucous. It’s not just the murder case. It’s the whole atmosphere. Are people ready for this? But don’t be afraid, the writers also give us some breathing space when the characters are debating, joking around a bit, irritating each others…
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