The Trial: A Murder in the Family

If you like legal dramas, this is a must see.

A mix of documentary and drama, it follows a murder case to its verdict. Without giving anything away, there's are segments towards that end of the mock trail showing flashbacks of the actual fictional murder and events leading up to it. It actually left me holding my breath, and there's a couple of very clever twists that leave you not knowing what is meant to have actually happened until the very end.

Showing accurate processes within a trial and the jury was totally absorbing. I was left emotionally drained at the end. I can't recommend this enough!

From start to finish I was hooked. This film manages to be original, important, and thoroughly engrossing. A must-see, for lots of reasons.

This was very well done, for what it was trying to achieve I think it succeeded brilliantly- informative and entertaining. Definitely worth watching if you like (1) British tv (rather than American), and (2) courtroom dramas.

This was a disappointing series because it used the contrivances of bad drama to obscure an important subject: the human nature of the justice system. I have been on two juries ( none a murder case) and deciding evidence is 'beyond a reasonable doubt' is dramatic enough without all the histrionics employed by this team of filmmakers. The inveterate use of close-ups is usually a good indication of bad directing; in a real trial trial there are no close-ups, just the tense space of uncomfortable people in a room together because of distressing circumstances.

Then there was the constant use of dramatic recreations. In a real trial you would have barren recreations of time and space sketched out in a video or on a whiteboard instead of these filmed dramas which could have never been used as evidence in a courtroom. Also, the timing was excruciatingly slow; there was about two episodes of material there stretched out to five overly long hours.

The drama in a real trial is the studied absence of drama and even the occasional flamboyance of a famous lawyer is looked up with distaste. Speaking of that, the defense lawyer with his organ-tone drawl was very irritating. he might as well have been selling snake oil. If he had been my lawyer, QC or not, the moment he opened his mouth he'd be out the door.

The way to due a series like this would have been to make it as realistic a trial as possible, not by hyping the drama but by revealing the boredom, the slowness of time, and the moments of real drama involving human beings and their lives. I have seen similar programs do this very effectively; one, done a few years ago, featured John Turturro as a shambolic detective. "The Night of...". That series made prison life come alive for me. "A Murder in the Family" just reminded me of a lot of bad movies.

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.