Deadline reports that The Good Wife’s Archie Panjabi will lead the season-one cast of The Jury, ABC’s latest foray into the land of anthology series. The Jury comes from executive producers Carol Mendelsohn (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation) and VJ Boyd, the latter of whom will also write the series with Mark Bianculli. Neil Burger (Divergent, Limitless) will direct the first season of the anthology series, which will follow the jury serving on a murder trial. It’s being described as “12 Angry Men meets the podcast Serial,” presumably because there’s no room in this matter of life and death for the kind of sequestering jokes made in Pauly Shore’s Jury Duty.
Panjabi, who returned to TV last October on Brooklyn Nine Nine, has signed on to play Kim, a “crusader” with a history of flitting from cause to cause. After being “ripped from the cause she thought she’d champion until her death” (so that’s who was behind the Gilmore Girls revival), Kim will dedicate herself to actually learning the truth of the crime in the lead up to rendering a verdict on a murder trial. The character is described as “a force of nature cloaked in a professional demeanor,” a look that suited Panjabi as the investigator who often utilized extralegal means on The Good Wife. Although she’s only signed on for one season, we’d like to see Panjabi return as a different juror ever year until she’s finally a rural one.