3. The Jury / The Beat – I don’t mention it enough, but Tom Fontana is awesome. I mean, he brought us Homicide and Oz. What more do you want from a man? The Jury was his experimental series focusing on a different jury (duh) deliberating on a case each week. It wasn’t his best work, but it was interesting, and the prison riot episode where the cast was made up of former Oz actors was fantastic. The Beat goes back to the early days of UPN, and it’s unjustly forgotten. Not only was it a well-written show about uniformed officers in New York, but there was a very cool technique where the scenes about their on-the-job lives were shot on film and their personal lives on video. And it’s also the only show to feature Richard Belzer as John Munch that hasn’t been released on DVD.
