THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE.('The Jury' and 'Summerland')(Television Program Review)

I'm so ashamed. Two new series are going head to head this summer on Tuesdays at nine. One of them, "The Jury," on Fox, is a serious drama made by people who have won Oscars, Emmys, and Peabody Awards, which focusses on juries in New York City's criminal court making big decisions about defendants on trial for things like murder; the other, "Summerland," on the WB, is a synthetic, credulity-straining melodrama from the schlitz brewery (that's schlock + glitz) of Aaron Spelling, about three kids from Kansas who are taken in by their fashion-designer aunt in Southern California after their parents die in an accident. And I prefer the second one. "Summerland" doesn't have an idea in its head, and "The Jury" does, but the latter show's preoccupations--the dynamics among any twelve people sitting in a room together (locked in a room together, in fact), the impossibility of knowing the whole truth about a case, the all too human imperfection of the judicial process--don't add up to more than the sum of their parts. They're like plants that never bloom, despite having been carefully watered and tended.

"The Jury" 's credits are as impressive as they come; the series was created by Tom Fontana, Barry Levinson, and James Yoshimura, who, along with Jim Finnerty, serve as executive producers. Levinson, Fontana, and Finnerty were executive producers of "Oz," which Fontana created and wrote for, and of "Homicide: Life on the Street," which Fontana and Yoshimura wrote for. (Levinson, Fontana, and Finnerty were also the executive producers of "The Beat," a police drama that ran on UPN for just a month in 2000--on Tuesdays at nine, as it happens.) Each episode of "The Jury" is centered on the disposition of one crime, and is anchored by the back-and-forth of the deliberating dozen, whose personalities and quirks start to become evident to us the moment they sit down, if not before. As they review the evidence and ask questions, we at home see quick shots of the crime scene and of the courtroom testimony, but we are never shown anything that would tell us any more than what the jury knows. The point of "The Jury" (which begins on June 8th, with a two-episode premiere) is that there is much that jurors can't know about a crime, even when it appears to be an open-and-shut case, and that we must constantly question our ability to judge even as we are duty-bound to judge. All is ambiguous, and potentially troubling, and even the concept of reasonable doubt leaves room for interpretation. But these issues are nothing new, either to anyone who has ever served on a jury or to anyone who has ever watched police or legal dramas on TV, where characters involved in the judicial process wrestle frequently and visibly with their consciences and with their decisions. Everybody has seen the attorney who, when it's all over, sits at his desk and stares thoughtfully into the middle distance--that is, into his own heart and soul. And there's always the juror who on leaving the courthouse momentarily looks skyward before melting into the crowd, feeling simultaneously a little lighter for having done his civic duty and a little weightier for knowing that he has been a factor in changing someone's life forever. (This is how the classic of the genre, Sidney Lumet's "12 Angry Men," ends: with Henry Fonda, who has served with heroic modesty, descending the courthouse steps and checking the weather as he rejoins the bustling society whose principles he has just so nobly upheld.)

Though the crimes in "The Jury" are different each week (the first three episodes all involve murder cases), I'm not convinced that the accretion of episodes will yield ever deeper insights into the system, especially since the show is to a great extent handicapped by its own formula. In each episode, we see enough of the process to realize that there's a great deal of arbitrariness inherent in the outcome; what we don't see is how each case is arbitrary in its own way, since we don't get to know the jurors well enough, or see enough of the details ...