The Jury digs into a grisly backyard crime but the real mystery is what happens in court

Everybody loves true crime but loving true crime comes at a cost. It’s a genre built on turning the suffering and anguish of real people into entertainment, with no real redeeming social benefits in sight. Unless, of course, you’re watching SBS’s reality series The Jury.

It’s a series that provides all the true crime thrills you could ask for, but with a twist: the crime is examined from the point of view of a jury, made up of regular Australians presented with all the facts and evidence from a recent criminal trial.

Will they come to the same verdict as the real jury? You’ll have to wait until the end of the series to find out.

Inside the jury room

The idea with The Jury, which is now in its second season, is to lift the lid on the way courts and juries operate. You don’t have to be a regular on social media to know a lot of people out there don’t have faith in the courts, and this series says less than a third of Australians trust the system. The hope is that by showing how juries reach their verdicts, the viewer will have a better idea of how the system works – or doesn’t.

So, as the opening text in every episode says, ‘This series is based on a real-life trial. It has been shortened, with details changed to anonymise the case.’ The opening scene that follows in episode one is pretty straightforward: a police car turns up at a demolition site, forensics are on the scene, a human skeleton (or parts thereof) is discovered. Crime time!

Before we get to the trial, we meet the jurors. This is where the reality show side of things kicks in, though compared to what we’re used to on Australian television the personalities here are pretty grounded. Yes, there’s a former 70s and 80s cover band lead singer (that’d be Sue) but she’s someone who ‘likes tradition’ – so maybe don’t hold out for any impromptu jam sessions

Hicko, the oldest, has 18 grandkids and says he’s ‘seen a lot of stuff over the years’; Sahar is a bit worried her strong feminist beliefs might cause friction. John is a man of faith who believes that God provides justice; Tim’s excited to be in a room with eleven other people he’ll probably disagree with.

Recreating the court case

Once they’re shuffled off to the courtroom (The Jury is filmed in an actual, if now disused, court), the proceedings follow the actual trial. Developments are recreated using the court transcripts and professional actors. Hopefully changing the names and a few details is enough to throw any full-time true crime fans off the track of the actual case, because this one does feel like the kind of case you’d remember.

The human remains discovered in the opening scene belong to a woman who disappeared a decade earlier; the prosecution claim the defendant unlawfully killed her and concealed her body in his backyard. It’s described as ‘a cold case, frozen in time for more than a decade’. That turns out to be something of an understatement.

Aside from the body and the suspicious location where it was found, the prosecution lack anything to tie the defendant to the crime… if there even was a crime. There’s no motive, no cause of death, no idea where she died or how she died. There’s no murder weapon, and no forensic evidence linking the defendant to the dead woman. It’s a bit of a puzzle.

Watch the trailer

Arguments and agendas

Both the prosecution and the defence turn out to have strong cases, so long as you believe the witnesses they put on the stand. The accused’s former flatmates say he used to say some dubious things; the defence points to the dead woman’s husband, who said some violent things himself.

The Jury: Skeleton in the Garden offers a solid true crime story with a bunch of twists and turns and plenty of scope for speculation. It also has 12 regular folk who increasingly find themselves turning on each other as they push for a result that – in some cases at least – seems to align with their own personal agenda.

There are a few flat patches here. Being based on an actual trial means not every moment is packed with high drama, and the legal side of things is as much about procedure as it is shock reveals. But as the trial wears on, and the jury room starts to heat up, it becomes as much about the clash of personalities as it is about whether justice will be done.

Which is to say, it’s increasingly gripping viewing whether you think the defendant did it or not. Turns out there’s a good reason why jury rooms are the secretive ‘black hole’ of our justice system: if every deliberation was public, you couldn’t keep the commercial networks away.

The Jury: Skeleton in the Garden premieres 5 October on SBS and SBS On Demand, with the final episode arriving 13 October.

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