March 14 – Jake Fogelnest gets a rundown of the first season of “Trials and Tributaries”

I have an idea for a show where each episode is a different court case (NOT Night Court). Some judges are crazy, some are all serious, either way they should be wildly different. Some cases make sense, with audience introspection encouraged, while some are completely absurd, with audience laughter anticipated. The verdicts are all over the place too. Anyway, here are some of the cases:

• The pilot episode is called “Emojail” and is about someone who harasses an ex-partner emojically, via text and whatever new app the kids use to text these days. The primary story line centres around an expert witness’s testimony. The court’s resident emoji specialist, some 14-year-old girl, translates the symbolized texts into English and explains the nuances of what he wrote to the old people in charge of putting him in and keeping him out of jail.
• There’s also “Don’t Be At It (Can’t Be At It)”, where a man went to work and stuck his finger out of his pants zipper to touch his co-workers with it. He gets charged with sexual harassment and we see how it all plays out. This is topical too, so I’m sure The Audio Visual Club will give it a decent review.
• “Judge Jury” (or “Delusions of Grand Juries”) is like Twelve Angry Men on hallucinogens. At one point they order a pizza with the only remaining slice from their previous pizza order used as the phone. I’ll tell you why before we meet with any network execs.
• In “Bun Head”, someone sues a guy they slept with after learning his man bun was a clip on.
• “Rowe v. Wade” is an intellectual property case involving competing independent sporting goods stores in a small Indiana town. It obviously has a lot of parallels with the abortion one from back in the day, and hopefully by the end everyone realizes the futility in getting anyone to change their mind.
• “Golden Army” has as the defendant this real guy named James Harrison (possibly played by the real-life guy, like in Best Years of Our Lives. Scientists say he has a golden arm because his plasma is the best plasma in the world and he donates it to save tons of lives. In this account, he stops giving away his plasma and some circuit court charges him with negligence causing murder. Hopefully he goes free but in this society you never know.
• The series finale “Notice of Dereliction” has me (playing myself, like in that new Clint Eastwood flick) getting arrested for something, not important what. All my notes files on my computer get used as evidence for me being unstable and whacked out, but my defence is that writing them down gets them out of my head and makes me half sensible at least. I can’t tell how this one ends yet.

Anyway, once you have some time let me know and we’ll pitch it to Netflix or whatever the new Netflix is by then.

[Editor’s note: The author won’t be in the new Clint Eastwood film. He’s referring to people who aren’t really actors playing themselves in a (semi-)fictional depiction.]