FOX 'The Jury' takes viewers into deliberation room

In this series, the jurors are the focus. Each week, 12 new actors take the roles.
By ED BARK
DALLAS MORNING NEWS
A lot of us try to get out of jury duty. Now we can see what we've been missing. Or maybe not.
Fox's "The Jury" is challenging and sometimes complex, which likely will make it a tough sell during the escapism-inclined hot summertime.
It aspires to be an up-close autopsy of the legal system, giving viewers fly-on-the-wall looks at the 12 men and women who dispense justice and sometimes get it right.
Co-creators Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson also defied conventional dramatic storytelling with HBO's "Oz" and NBC's "Homicide: Life on the Street."
Each episode of "The Jury" introduces another dozen New York City deliberators while staying the course with a regular cast of prosecutors and defenders. The judge, no-nonsense Horatio Hawthorne, is played by Levinson, also known for directing films such as "Rain Man," "Tin Men" and "The Natural."
By the script
Be aware that this is a fully scripted series, not a ramped-up version of "Judge Judy" or "The People's Court." In fact, "The Jury" provides weekly care and sustenance, if not huge paychecks, to unusually large groups of workaday thespians. For that alone, the "reality"-bludgeoned Screen Actors Guild should give it a medal of honor.
The first of Tuesday's back-to-back episodes finds jurors deciding the guilt or innocence of a teenage boy. The kid, being tried as an adult, is charged with killing a basketball prodigy by shooting him through his bedroom window from an adjacent rooftop.
The defendant and some pals otherwise were raucously celebrating New Year's Eve by detonating firecrackers and a firearm.
Jurors are a suitably diverse group representing a full spectrum of ages and ethnicities. Some of their verbal clashes are a bit too typical or overplayed.
And stereotypes are reinforced, at least in the opening hour, by a dim-bulb, young blond woman and a rigid "in my day" oldster.
The opening minutes can be something of a jumble. Deliberations give way to flashbacks of key courtroom testimony, and vice-versa. After a while, though, the case begins to make sense, as do the jury's deliberations.
It's like gingerly wading into a backyard pool during the transitional period spanning late May and early June. The water takes a little getting used to, but soon, it's just fine.
The regular cast
Prosecutor John Ranguso (Billy Burke) opposes defender Megan Delaney (Anna Friel) in the first case. She also handles the second episode's trial while alternate hunk Keenan O'Brien (Jeff Hephner) seeks a guilty verdict in the case of a young man who claims that a Romeo-Juliet-style suicide pact hit a snag when he chickened out after she fatally shot herself.
Comic relief, much of it ham-handed, is the principal duty of nerdy bailiff Steve Dixon (Adam Busch from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"). "The Jury" would be better served without his annoying presence, but one suspects that Fox executives emphatically insisted otherwise.
Whatever the case, we end up finding out who committed the crime, and whether jurors jailed an innocent person, set a bad guy free or rendered the proper verdict. But to get hooked, you first have to stay tuned long enough to sort out the particulars.
Summertime's a tougher testing ground in that respect. Are enough viewers willing to pay rapt attention to an unconventional and sometimes intricate series that still needs to work out some of its kinks? Even in sweater weather, that can be a lot to ask these days.