So I watched 2 hours of the Jury to see 5 seconds of the star, Shalom Harlow (is she that bad that they list her as the #2 star, yet she barely appears in the first two episodes?). I watched since the show had a connection to Homicide.
Midway through, the flashbacks were annoying, but the revelation at the end was really, really annoying. Talk about not giving you any reason to invest in a show, if you didn’t watch, at the end of an hour of watching a Benetton ad debate a case, we are shown the crime and court case through a series of flashbacks. All the while, you can vote on your text messaging phone - guilty or not (which was odd since the first case had multiple levels of guilty), in the end, whatever feelings they had built with you are crushed as they arbitrarily tack on an ending, not leaving things vague and unknowing.
That started the debate of what shows have had gimmicks and lasted? The girlie insisted that shows use gimmicks to draw attention when they are new, and then drop them - Seinfeld (which didn’t really drop it but muted its use). I don’t know. About once every couple of years someone tries the talking to the camera crap, and my trump to her answer was of course two words. Cop Rock.
So has a show based on a gimmick ever lasted and kept the gimmick intact?
Chet