Boy is there a drought in summer for TV and film. Last year we had Barbenheimer, which was such a talking point that it now has its own Wikipedia page. This August, the most we can look forward to is It Ends with Us, a domestic abuse story billed as a rom-com, which is getting attention for all the wrong reasons. Rumours of a feud between the co-stars have been the only reason this thing gets any publicity. There’s Borderlands, an imaginative cross between Guardians of the Galaxy and Mad Max starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart. Just think about that cast combination for a moment. There’s also the new Alien film Romulus, which isn’t worth the ticket price. Just watch the original 1979 film at home on Disney+ and save yourself £15.
At home, we’ve been reduced to scrolling Netflix and Amazon Prime for new content, which, unless you fancy four seasons of Umbrella Academy, is pretty spare. Over on ITV they’ve come out with a new season of The Twelve, an Australian adaptation of a Belgian court room drama. As you might guess, it features the lives and dramas of the twelve jurors who will pass judgement on the accused. The defendants are two lovers, Sasha and Patrick, charged with killing Sasha’s mother. Bernice the mother was a widow and owner of a vast sheep ranch who disapproved heartily of her Sasha’s relationship with Patrick, but was this enough for them to pop her off? More likely it was the $20 million ranch Sasha was after. Or maybe it was Patrick’s idea. Does Patrick really love her? Her certainly makes love to her a lot¾ ‘They’re at it like rabbits,’ as one witness delicately puts it.
Erroll Shand plays Patrick, an extraordinarily ugly yet charismatic ranch, with greasy red hair and a lot of back tattoos. One might wonder what Sasha sees in him—her mother certainly does—but the jurors assume he’s after the ranch. The odd thing is that no one seems to know how much money it’s worth. Before her murder, Bernice was in debt to just about everyone, from her ranch hands to the guy who sells her farm equipment. The revelation in court that the ranch is worth $20 million comes as a surprise even to her daughter.
If the ranch’s value wasn’t known, then what was the motive for murder? This being a small town in remote Western Australia, everyone knows the dead woman, everyone hated her, and thus everyone has a motive. Suspects include a lesbian neighbour whose dog Bernice shot for chasing her chickens; and an angry gang of local hog hunters.
The main thrill of this court room drama is watching the barristers set their traps and wait for the witnesses to walk into them. Every time we think the game is up for Sasha and Patrick, their lawyers turn the tables. The polished barrister duo are convincingly played by Sam Neill and Frances O’Connor. How does Sam Neill still look fifty? He seems to be frozen in perpetual middle-age, capable of playing the love interest even though he was born in the 1940s. He looks the same age as Frances O’Connor, twenty years his junior.
Shame the jury is so boring; a long line-up of characters (mostly unlikeable) whose lives we follow outside of the court room. Presumably the jurors are important given the show’s title, but the characters feel half-drawn, their dramas an afterthought which the writers would rather have skipped over. Josh McKenzie plays a cash-strapped truck driver who shoots up in his girlfriend’s bedroom while she makes dinner. Anthony Brandon Wong is a wealthy, bitter businessman and father of two suffering from prostate cancer. His homophobia is lazily done. Speaking to his gay male nurse he says, ‘I don’t have a problem with your kind, but…’ He also threatens to withhold his kids’ inheritance if they don’t come to visit him. Then there’s the middle-aged housewife who looks after her demented mother and wages war on the Aboriginal kids next door. Apparently, she’s a ‘racist bitch’ for asking that the neighbour kids don’t throw eggs at her kitchen window. The simmering racial tensions are one of the few interesting aspects of the story, culturally specific as they are to Australia, but they don’t come to very much. There are too many supporting characters to really feel like you can root for one. The setup reminds me of Lost, that early 2000s series about the plane passengers who crash and are stranded on a mysterious island for ages. Almost the entire show takes place as flashbacks to normal life before the crash, and events which somehow come to bear on the unfolding drama on the deserted island. Also like The Twelve, the title of Lost doesn’t quite describe what it’s actually about. The characters aren’t lost, they’re stuck. Stuck is hardly an appropriate title for an adventure mystery series, so that can be forgiven. The Twelve is hardly original but for courtroom dramas, the titles have all been taken: Accused, Reasonable Doubt,Presumed Innocent – I’ve also scrolled past one on Netflix called OMG 2, which defies all categorisation.
The whodunnit part of The Twelve is all right – Sam Neill and Frances O’Connor lead a solid cast – but the production value isn’t. Cuts between scenes which should be cuts are sometimes fades, which give it a slight daytime-television vibe. It shouldn’t feel cheap; Warner Bros International are producing, so the shoddy editing is down to the directors and writers. Widely distributed drama from Western Australia is thin on the ground, so it’s a shame this one isn’t better. If there’s a season three, I won’t bother.
