The Real Tribal Council

Yea

r in and year out, TV tells stories about cops who put away the bad guys and lawyers who free the innocent. In real life, though, neither group does the putting away or the freeing. We give that job to amateurs — jurors — and early on, the Fox drama The Jury (Tuesdays, 9 p.m. E.T.; debuts June 8, 8 p.m. E.T.) shows us what it believes is one of their biggest influences: TV. In one case, although the young defendant's record is sealed, a juror concludes — because of something he saw on a lawyer show — that the accused must have a long rap sheet. Another bases his thinking on a Discovery Channel documentary he saw about the teen brain. Ask for a jury of your peers, dear viewer, and this is what you get.

A flawed but rewarding show about a flawed but noble process, The Jury comes from Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana, of Homicide and Oz. Those dramas focused on the human, fallible side of the criminal-justice system; they were good preparation for this most idiosyncratic aspect of the trial process. Even for these producers, this could not have been an easy pitch. ("You've got 12 people in a room talking, and — guys? Hello?") To liven things up, The Jury cuts antically to the trial, lawyer negotiations and meetings in chambers. In this sense, it resembles Law & Order, which must have made the pitch much easier.

But where police procedurals walk viewers through an investigation — allowing them to pretend they're solving the case themselves — The Jury leads them each week through the nebulous process of argument, negotiation and judgment. As important as the facts are the jurors' biases and baggage. Evaluating an expert's testimony, one man grumbles, "My wife was diagnosed by three different experts. She died anyway." The same testimony can lead two well-intentioned people to opposite conclusions. It's 12 Angry Rasho-men.

The dialogue can be thuddingly expository, and with so many new faces each week, the characterizations are sketchy. But there are also regular courtroom characters, the best of whom is sarcastic judge Horatio Hawthorne, played by Levinson. His delivery is a bit awkward and unactorly, yet it gives the proceedings a note of documentary reality, unlike the pretty and generically well-spoken lawyers.

The Jury is part of Fox's strategy to forgo the summer-rerun season. The network launches six new shows this month, even though the summer has been friendlier to escapist confections like The O.C. and, especially, reality series. Then again, consider how many great reality-show moments — tribal councils, boardrooms — are just people sitting around talking. As on many reality shows, The Jury ends in a dramatic "reveal": a flashback, after the verdict, to the crime (or noncrime), which lets the audience see whether the jury got it right. It makes for provocative, thoughtful endings, the kind that could just make The Jury real enough to succeed.