The Jury: Murder Trial – disquieting Channel 4 series about group dynamics

"What goes on in a jury room? Perhaps, if you've never done jury service, you imagine it to be a rigorous process in which 12 people take account of nothing but the facts," said Anita Singh in The Daily Telegraph. If so, Channel 4's The Jury: Murder Trial "will quickly disabuse you". 

Over four "fascinating" episodes, it uses actors to recreate a real-life murder trial in front of two separate "juries". The defendant is a sculptor, identified here as John, who has killed his wife with a hammer. The question for the juries is whether it was murder, or manslaughter by reason of loss of control. It is "eye-opening" to see how quickly the jurors reach conclusions about both the defendant, and the victim ("She was asking for it"). In all, it's a "riveting study of group dynamics, which may make you feel a little less confident in the workings of the British justice system".

As a television show, it is not very entertaining, said Rachel Cooke in The New Statesman. "Picture the Big Brother house," only without the hot tub, and featuring conversations not about "who ate the last digestive" but "whether a man killed a woman in cold blood". And it's pretty alarming: even the more conscientious jurors seem mainly to want to win the argument; and the "easy excuses" the men make for violence against women are chastening indeed. 

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You do suspect that some of the bigger characters on the jury are "mugging for the cameras", said Barbara Ellen in The Observer. Still, this is "worrying, revelatory" television: "The Traitors" with real-world implications.