“Expository” is a writing term for material used to reveal pre-existing facts. Dialogue that is seen as being blatantly expository — “boy, I’m a pilot!” — is considered clunky. Most police procedurals suffer at least somewhat from expository dialog, as the detectives are coming in after the crime and people have to tell them what happened.
The Jury, a new crime show which sees everything through the eyes of the deliberating jury judging the crime, is crippled with a severe expository problem. Y’see, the jury can’t just do expository on the crime. They didn’t see the crime, they saw the court case. So much of the show is the jury doing expository on the court case, which means that they’re doing expository dialogue about on other people’s expository dialogue.
Despite all the effort to inject attitude into this, the concept seems lame from the get-go.
(The episode I watched was the second one, which included much contextual discussion of Romeo and Juliet… including key discussion that got the plot wrong. And I guess I should post a spoiler warning for those who have not experienced R&J in some form. In the show, they said that Romeo and Juliet’s death was not a double suicide pact, which is correct. However, they then went and refered to their deaths as being accidents, which is totally incorrect. Each committed suicide, they just didn’t plan it together. In fact, each committed suicide for the same reason: they believed the other was dead.)
