It's time to bring back 'Trial and Error'
This summer, comedy and crime collide with a trio of hotly anticipated TV shows: Only Murders In the Building, Based on a True Story, and The Afterparty. Each series finds humor in the dark hearts of true crime fans, gleefully investigating the twisted fantasies of citizen detectives, aspiring podcasters, and spiraling suspects. But before the success of Only Murders — which might be credited for this wave of cozy crime comedy — there was Trial & Error, a superb sitcom ahead of its time and gone too soon.
Airing from March 14, 2017, to August 23, 2018, Trial & Error earned praise from critics but was dropped by NBC after 2 seasons. Its producing studio, Warner Bros. Television, sought a new home for a possible Season 3, telling Deadline in January of 2019, "We are open to an opportunity to continue the series, should one arise in the future.” No network nor streaming platform took the chance then, but now? Now is the perfect time to give this show a retrial.
True crime is a booming business in entertainment, spurring countless podcasts, documentaries, and TV series based on real cases. Aside from the fictional comedies mentioned above, shows like Inventing Anna, Love & Death, The Thing About Pam, and Joe vs. Carole have taken real, notorious cases and turned them into darkly comedic television. But before all of these, Trial & Error found the funny in the horror, and without naming names.
What was Trial & Error?
Created by Jeff Astrof and Matthew Miller, Trial & Error parodied provocative murder cases with a mockumentary setup that nodded to its inspirations. Season 1 centered on the trial against Larry Henderson (John Lithgow in goofy Third Rock From The Sun mode), a married man and avid roller skater accused of fatally throwing his wife through a window in their home.
Details of the case, including the revelation of a shocking same-sex affair, bizarre blood spatter, and a feather-brained alternate theory, are plucked from the 2004 documentary series The Staircase. (There's also the controversial dramatic series The Staircase, starring such prestigious talent as Colin Firth and Toni Collette as Michael and Kathleen Peterson.) Like the accused Michael Peterson, Lithgow's alleged wife-slayer got questionably chummy with the documentary crew that followed him around, in his case repeatedly putting his foot in his mouth and appearing on camera without pants.
Season 2 dug into other areas of true crime, but most notably it referenced The Jinx, with Kristin Chenoweth as a gender-swapped Robert Durst. As the wealthy and reckless Lavinia Peck-Foster, she was a vision of perversion facilitated by extreme privilege and assumed invincibility. While the show takes major liberties with each story — and doesn't directly note being loosely inspired by real events — Astrof and Miller were sure to include some of the stranger-than-fiction bits of Durst's story, like cross-dressing to avoid detection, shoplifting a sandwich despite being absurdly rich, and whispering a clumsy confession in a bathroom while wearing a mic pack.
For true crime die-hards, a creepy thrill comes from recognizing these tidbits of macabre trivia. However, Trial & Error is hilarious even without these eerie Easter Eggs. (Sincerely, I watched and loved the first season before I'd seen a single sequence of The Staircase.)
Trial & Error was a fish-out-of-water comedy full of slapstick, silliness, and satire.
Behind the flashy conceit of true crime turned comedy, this series centered on a promising young attorney from New York who is out of his depths in a deeply eccentric Southern small town. Josh Segal (a chipper and charming Nicholas D'Agosto) is fresh-faced and idealistic, raring to fight hard and fair for his first murder trial defendant ever. But all his education and poise have not prepared him for the quirks of East Peck, South Carolina, where the accents twang, the locals celebrate nonsensical holidays, and "brother-cousin" is as casual a phrase as "lady driver."
Josh is bewildered by all of it, from his bumpkin assistants (Steven Boyer and Sherri Shepherd) to the hard-nosed prosecutor (Jayma Mays) whose thirst for a death penalty conviction nearly matches her lust for sexually explicit banter. Each episode not only threw a new complication Josh's way — be it an alibi issue, a recovered potential murder weapon, or the revelation of a past crime with new relevance — but also a new outrageous element of East Peck's culture.
The mockumentary setup offers a space for Josh to regard the audience as confidantes, welcoming us into his thought process. But more than that, it offers the show's most bizarre characters a place to be more than punchlines (though there are plenty of those in the talking head interviews as well). Within snagged reaction shots and chaotic interviews, the tourist and the Peckers come to vibrant life, so you can't help but root for all of them, even if someone's got to lose.
Through the building ridiculousness, Trial & Error was not only wildly amusing, but it also offered an earnest critique of the American justice system and the way it can be swayed by big personalities, big money, and lawyers more focused on their careers than decency. The courtroom is presented as a wrestling ring where playing by the rules is no sure way to win. So, what does this mean for a noble lawyer looking to do his best for his client? It means ending up in all kinds of comically compromising positions.
Yet for all the corruption, crime, and culture clashes in Trial & Error, the show maintained the kind of jaunty optimism of Parks and Recreation. No matter what obstacles Josh and his team face, they faced it together, chins up. The show reveled in pulling the rug out beneath them, almost at the end of every single episode, creating a cliffhanger setup that makes this show an absolutely addictive binge. But there's no stress to the tension of whether or not Josh will win the day, not only because this is a sitcom so he'll never win or lose too hard, but also because the vibe of this show is that fighting the good fight is a victory all its own. Things in East Peck never get too bleak, making Trial & Error a wonderful pick for feel-good watching.
As wacky and truly weird as Trial & Error was, perhaps we should just be grateful we got two pretty stellar seasons of it. But on a recent rewatch, I was haunted by what could have been.
What would Trial & Error have done in Season 3?
One of the wildest running jokes of Trial & Error is about their witch trials…of 1994. What begins as a punchline meant to point out how backward this Southern town is becomes a setup for Season 3 at the very end of the second season's finale.
As Josh and his team celebrate a hard-won victory, a phone call comes into their office's answering machine. A male voice says, "Hi. I don't know if you followed the witch trials of 1994. I need you to help free the East Peck Three. Those two boys need your help."
First up, they're the East Peck Three, but there are two of them. Classic Trial & Error. Beyond that, based on the name and the gender of the (wrongfully?) convicted, it seems Astrof and Miller were fixing to tap another true crime classic for their third season, the Paradise Lost trilogy. This documentary series directed by Bruce Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger famously followed the case of the West Memphis Three, teenage boys who were accused of killing children as part of a Satanic ritual. It's the grimmest source material the show would have dealt with to date. And yet, I can't shake the desire to see what humor and life lessons would be plumbed from such darkness. Plus, the Satanic Panic is a great topic to probe if the show's creators are up to turning their satirical eye on modern moral panics — say, over drag queens and trans people's access to bathrooms.
Could Trial & Error return?
Why not? There's a slew of TV shows that have come back years after cancellation, from Doctor Who to Arrested Development to Full House and Futurama, which returns again this summer after 10 years away.
The core cast and crew have moved on, but not so far that a reunion would be impossible. And just imagine what guest stars they could bring on board for another spin around East Peck. Off the top of my head, it'd be a dizzying delight to see child star turned comedy genius Daniel Radcliffe join this crew as one of the East Peck Three. Maybe Amazon Studios could pick up this option and bring some of their stars into the fold, like Fleabag's Phoebe Waller-Bridge as a journalist who wrote a book on the three and so is dedicated to getting them exonerated? Perhaps Disney could pick it up and give us a mockumentary crossover event, where What We Do In The Shadows' Jackie Daytona comes to testify — at night, naturally. And this is just me spitballing without a murder board or anything!
Truly, there's a world of incredible potential for where Trial & Error could go next. If only some studio/streamer would have the guts to take a stand.