One of the classic courtroom dramas is Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men (1957). In it, the twelve members of a jury discuss, argue and fight till they reach a verdict in the allocated 96 minutes of screening time. Reginald Rose’s script never ventures into the courtroom and we only see the accused in the final shot of the film. Flash forward to 2019; you are a TV producer and want to make a TV series focusing on the goings on within the jury in a murder trial. However, 96 minutes is nowhere enough for a TV series. How about 500 minutes? How do you stretch the material that far? Well, in the Belgian series The Twelve (Netflix), its creators and writers Sanne Nuyens and Bert Van Dael, director Wouter Bouvijn, and producer Peter Bouckart not only take the viewers inside the courtroom but also inside the homes and private lives of some of the twelve jurors (plus two reserve jurors) and other characters related to the trial. We also get to hear the details of the crime and witness both the prosecutor’s questioning and the accused lawyer’s defence.
Of course, the success of the above approach depends on just how interesting the private lives of these characters are and how compulsive is the courtroom proceedings. The first thing that is noticeable is how different the courtroom proceedings are in Belgium to everywhere that we’ve seen on TV and in films. The judge takes a much more active role, the jury can ask questions during the trial and so on.
One of the cinematic devices that Rose used in his script for Twelve Angry Men was for the juror played by Henry Fonda to reveal bits of findings that he had deduced to the other jury members throughout the movie. This device is also used in The Twelve, but in a different way. Every so often, using flashbacks, a new piece of information about the crime is revealed to us the viewers, but not always to the jury. In effect, we the TV audience, who are making our own judgment, have our views regarding the guilt or innocence of the accused tested by every new piece of evidence revealed. This practice continues right up to the very end, meaning that the final verdict of the viewers would be given after the jury have submitted their own verdict.
We get to know about the private lives of some members of the jury. There is the wife suffering from her insanely jealous husband. The construction company owner feeling guilty about the accidental death of an illegal immigrant whom he had employed. The sex addict who is heavily in debt and is selling stories about the jury to the media. The rich girl whose own parents were brutally murdered. The elderly single man who has very conservative views and refuses to get any more lifts from another jury member once he finds out that she is a lesbian. The over-protective father worried about his daughter’s sex, drugs and rock n roll lifestyle.
The other characters that we spend much time with during the series are the people at the centre of the trial. A woman is accused of murdering her best friend twenty years ago and killing her own baby recently, when the social services gave total custody of the child to her estranged husband. We get to know the father of the deceased best friend who is an animal rights activist and believes that the accused woman is innocent; the estranged husband, his partner and her mother; the corrupt policewoman hell bent on proving the guilt of the accused; the reporter trying to get inside information about the case, the lawyers, the judge and the prosecutor.
The Twelve’s content varies between compulsively watchable to verging on the uninteresting. This is because most of the jurors or their family are so off-putting that one does not wish to spend much time in their company, while the murder case itself, and the characters closely associated with it, are compelling. All in all, The Twelve is worth a binge watch and an added bonus is that it eschews both a cliché ending and a Hollywood ending.
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