I've always resented the implication, usually put forth by snobbish intellectuals, that watching TV fiction disconnects people from reality and desensitizes them to actual horrible events. I've never believed that spending time watching simulated tragedy would render me unable to properly respond to or understand events in real life.
That is, until I started watching The Michael Jackson Trial (weekdays, 7:30 and 9 p.m.), E!'s mind-boggling re-enactments and analysis of the Michael Jackson child molestation trial. Somewhere in my mind, I know Michael Jackson is a real person and is on trial for potentially real, serious crimes in an actual courtroom, defended by real lawyers, presided over by a real judge, and featuring actual people (many of them celebrities) as witnesses. Yet, after watching a week's worth of E!'s awesomely campy, bargain-basement re-enactments of key court moments, I have a hard time viewing the trial as anything more than entertainment—and hilariously bad entertainment at that.
Taking E!'s obsession with celebrity coverage to its logical extreme, The Michael Jackson Trial is a daily half-hour show devoted to Jackson's court proceedings in Santa Maria, California, where he is charged with molesting an adolescent boy, as well as with a number of related matters. Unless you've been living under a rock, you've heard about Jackson's legal troubles. They're a frequent topic on entertainment shows, cable news networks and talk shows.
But no one pays as much attention to this sort of thing as E!, the barometer of our culture's obsession with celebrities. If The Michael Jackson Trial wasn't so bizarrely entertaining, it'd be the most disturbing thing on television for the way it reduces complex real-life events to stilted re-enactments and shallow armchair analysis.
The show is so deadly serious that it almost plays like a parody of itself, with host James Curtis, a former prosecutor, speaking in clipped tones to rush through an entire day's worth of coverage in a half-hour, constantly emphasizing that the re-enactments are based on actual courtroom transcripts (cameras are forbidden in the courtroom for the trial).
After Curtis' introduction and a stern warning about "frank talk of a sexual nature," we get the re-enactments, interspersed with commentary from a panel of legal experts.
Although the show has gotten a lot of attention for the casting of Jackson impersonator Edward Moss, who also appeared as Jackson in Scary Movie 3, the real stars in the first week have been Rigg Kennedy as defense attorney Thomas Mesereau and Charles Haigh as prosecutor Tom Sneddon. Kennedy, with the same ridiculous, shaggy haircut as the real Mesereau, brings a nefarious quality to his portrayal of Jackson's attorney, casually impugning the credibility of witnesses like the alleged victim's 18-year-old sister.
The appearances of various witnesses give the show even more of a fictional feel, as each episode features a special guest star to spice up the day's plot. The first week's biggest name was Martin Bashir, the journalist behind the famous Living with Michael Jackson documentary, but future episodes promise more interesting names from the lawyers' witness lists. You can't help but wonder who E! will bring into play Jay Leno, Elizabeth Taylor or Kobe Bryant. Will has-been child star Corey Feldman be prevailed upon to play himself? The possibilities are endless.
Since each episode is put together from the previous day's testimony in less than 24 hours, production values are understandably low. Actors read from TelePrompters, making the show feel even more like a skit on a late-night talk show. The set looks like it was constructed from plywood, and there is no jury. Although this is almost certainly a cost-saving measure, the effect is jarringly self-reflexive.
Since there are no jurors, we watch Mesereau and Sneddon talk directly to us, making explicit what is implicit in a media-saturated trial: We are the real jury, especially those of us celebrity-obsessed enough to be watching the re-enactments.
There are numerous moments of unintentional hilarity, many thanks to the choices the actors make in bringing to life the sometimes dry transcripts. E! has decided to bleep the last name of the accuser's family, but since they also bleep any words not appropriate for TV, every time someone says the family name, it seems like it's a dirty word. I can't help but imagine more and more obscene words each time the surname is mentioned.
Everything the analysts say also ends up sounding like a double entendre, and it's hard not to think they are just as detached as us. The commentary sounds like a post-game show, with endless speculation about who's winning and losing.
Clearly, on this ridiculous train wreck of a show, the answer to both of those is the viewer.