ABSTRACT
The most attention-getting episodic dramas in America today are not the weekly segments of N.Y.P.D. Blue but the actual criminal cases on which their scripts are often based. How will the O.J. trial “turn out”? What was in von Bulow’s black bag? Are the Menendez brothers sympathetic victims or greedy and ruthless murderers? Americans follow these unfolding stories with the same—often far greater—interest than we give to best-selling novels. Indeed, the two are dynamically connected. The way we “read” actual trials is critically shaped by our experience as readers and viewers of courtroom dramas, movies, and TV shows. We cheer for familiar heroes, recoil from recognizable villains, and predict the trial’s outcome based as much on the logic of the genre of courtroom drama as on the admissible testimony in a particular case. To an armchair juror wielding a television remote control, there is little distinction between the nightly news coverage of a case, the fictional episode loosely based on its facts, and the television docudrama rushed into production before the jury has even been seated in the same case.
