In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by three separate yet equally important groups: The police who investigate crime; the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders; and the jury of viewers who determine their fates by yelling at them from the couch, disseminating justice and Doritos crumbs. These are the stories that Law & Order dickwolf Dick Wolf hopes to tell with the tentatively titled You The Jury, a live, one-hour, interactive reality series he just sold to NBC. Taking a break from delving into the lives of the many sexy, shirtless civil servants of Chicago, Wolf has teamed with the producers of Top Chef and Project Runway to transform real-life civil court cases into reality entertainment, with the verdicts turned over to the people whose judgment is most unimpeachably sound: NBC’s primetime audience.
If this all seems rather dangerously arbitrary to turn your serious legal cases over to random men, women, and dogs who know how to use the phone, in much the same way they might vote for some acrobat on America’s Got Talent, rest assured that the regular court system is pretty fucked too. At least this way you get to be on the TV.