Like it or not, true crime has become a huge part of our entertainment diet. Endless documentaries and TV depictions of high-profile murderers prove the genre is enormous, with seven million UK listeners tuning into true crime podcasts every month, and Netflix’s 2022 Jeffrey Dahmer programme still its fourth-most watched show ever. The public’s appetite for serial killer psychology is now considered, well, totally normal.
This year has been the year true crime has truly taken over theatre, too, with a dramatisation of the Raoul Moat saga in Manhunt; Punch, a portrayal of a lethal fist thrown outside a Nottingham pub; and London Road, based on the story of the Suffolk Strangler who brutally murdered five female sex workers in 2006.
The latest frontier? An immersive stage show called The Jury Experience, which turns the theatre into a courtroom and sees members of the audience play juror – Secret Cinema meets 12 Angry Men, if you like. The scale of this is staggering – it’s being shown in 63 different cities across the globe, from London to Seattle, Valencia to Sydney. The performances mirror the intricacies of a real trial – audiences witness testimonies, review cross-examinations, and look at “forensic evidence”. At the end, they cast their verdict on the accused. “Will justice be served? Well, that’s up to you,” reads the show description.
I’ve been summoned for jury service twice now and find the idea of this being turned into a “fun night out” baffling. All of the trials I served on were minor indictments, but it was still a demanding and draining experience to potentially alter the course of someone’s life. While I was there, I met a fellow juror who’d served on a highly traumatic trial that took months to conclude. He had to go through extensive therapy afterwards to deal with the scarring evidence he’d witnessed. Hearing him speak about the trial and the PTSD he experienced was an eye-opener to just how upsetting the duty can be.
The Jury Experience is showing monthly at London’s Shaw Theatre (Photo: Fever Up)The Jury Experience talks about the “buzz of a real courtroom” – but that “buzz” can be genuine horror. New research has found that many jurors experience symptoms including intrusive thoughts, difficulty sleeping and PTSD, as a result of what they see and hear in court. A 2016 paper from The Journal of Criminal Justice found that up to 50 per cent of jurors they studied experienced trauma-related symptoms.
Sure, courtroom dramas have been around since Ancient Greek times, when they were staged dramatically in agoras and featured crowd participation. You could say that The Jury Experience is just entertainment – a bit of fun. You could even claim that productions like this help to demystify the justice system and show viewers how to construct a coherent defence.
But there are real, damaging consequences. There’s the potential to dehumanise victims and put criminals on a pedestal, of course (Netflix’s The Menendez Brothers, anyone?). The “true” in true crime is sometimes debatable, too, thanks to errors and omissions by producers (the inconsistencies in Making A Murderer, for example) – which creates stories that are compelling but one-sided. We’ve come to see ourselves as a nation of experts and, in some cases, true crime has actually obstructed justice, with armchair detectives contaminating evidence – such as in the cases of Jay Slater and Nicola Bulley.
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By conflating public duty with entertainment, we are entering dangerous territory where real trials aren’t taken seriously. What I saw in court – including other jurors doodling or reading the wrong page of evidence when asked – suggested not everyone was giving it their full attention. While some might switch off, others thrive off this sensationalised role – just look at the Reddit threads around popular cases, concocting elaborate theories and looking outside of the courtroom for evidence (a serious crime in itself). The Jury Experience only encourages this – and it’s part of a worrying “immersive” trend.
London’s Jury Games is a new crime investigation team game where you can “interrogate a defendant”, something that’s “guaranteed to get the heart pumping”. Then there’s the Murder Trial Tonight show, another courtroom-style performance where the audience deliberates before delivering a verdict.
Just as we now understand the problematic nature of posing with tigers in Thailand, or visiting a “prison concept” bar in a bright orange jumpsuit, immersive jury experiences are due social suicide status, too. If we really must, let’s stick to watching justice play out on our TVs – before we get too deep into the fantasy.
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