Television can’t get enough of real-life court cases

In late 1994, a murder trial began gripping the world, dominating news headlines for much of the next year. The American football legend OJ Simpson had been charged with killing his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goodman (Simpson was subsequently acquitted).

The legal proceedings were dubbed “the trial of the century” and led to TV news channels poring over the details of the case around the clock. Not only did it make stars of its major players, including Simpson’s lawyer, the late Robert Kardashian (whose wife and children went on to become reality TV stars), but it spawned scores of documentary films and a hit drama series in Ryan Murphy’s The People v OJ Simpson. All this because of the decision by the judge to allow TV cameras into the courtroom.

Viewers old enough to recall the Simpson feeding frenzy may well have experienced déjà vu last year as a fraught legal battle between actors Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard unfolded in a Virginia courtroom. Depp launched a $50mn lawsuit against Heard following her 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post in which she stated she was “a public figure representing domestic abuse”. Heard filed a countersuit in which she accused Depp of defaming her by claiming her allegation was fabricated. The decision to allow cameras into the courtroom unleashed a ghoulish seven-week spectacle in which the intimate and often unsettling details of the couple’s relationship were relayed around the world.

Now, nearly a year on from the verdict — the jury found in favour of Depp, though Heard won on one aspect of her countersuit — the case has been revived in Depp v Heard, a three-part Channel 4 series by the director Emma Cooper. Containing courtroom footage, news reports plus an avalanche of commentary from podcast hosts, vloggers, TikTok-ers and sundry amateur reporters, the series considers the contrasting perceptions of Depp and Heard as portrayed online. While some following the case sided with Heard, citing the case as a landmark in the #MeToo movement, many more allied themselves with Depp, with hundreds turning up to the courtroom each day to show their support.

Cooper’s isn’t the first film to capitalise on the clamour surrounding the case: the Discovery Plus network was quick off the draw with last year’s Johnny vs Amber: The US Trial, a sequel of sorts to Johnny vs Amber, the same channel’s film about Depp’s 2020 libel case against The Sun newspaper (the paper had published an article that called him a “wife beater”; Depp lost the case). Last autumn Hot Take: The Depp/Heard Trial was released, a straight-to-TV drama based on news reports and court transcripts that was every bit as crude and unappetising as it sounds.

So why the fascination? Perhaps because seeing a celebrity cross-examined, rendered vulnerable while revealing the private details of their lives, appeals to viewers’ prurient impulses and because, in the age of social media, everyone has an opinion — a fact that is not lost on TV producers.

Last year’s Vardy vs Rooney libel case in London, nicknamed the “Wagatha Christie” trial, similarly caught the public imagination; although cameras were not allowed in court, the case was exhaustively reported and has since yielded a TV drama starring Michael Sheen, a West End play and multiple documentaries.

Of course, the case of Vardy vs Rooney was a comparatively low-stakes event — Coleen Rooney, spouse of footballer Wayne Rooney, had accused fellow footballer’s wife Rebekah Vardy of leaking stories from her private Instagram account to the press, prompting Vardy to sue unsuccessfully. By contrast, the courtroom allegations made by Heard against Depp were more serious, involving domestic violence. But as with the OJ Simpson case, this hasn’t stopped TV producers from repackaging the proceedings as entertainment.

For all its pretensions of social commentary, Depp v Heard feels like still more opportunism, inviting us to compare the two actors’ versions of events while once again broadcasting the trial’s more unpleasant, headline-grabbing moments. What separates Cooper’s series from the other films on the Depp/Heard case is this attempt at moral judgment. The series rearranges the timeline of the case to present Depp and Heard’s testimony side by side (in fact they were delivered a fortnight apart), while offering a critique on the toxicity of the online world in which sharing clips and taking sides on an inflammatory topic can boost the income of content creators. What Cooper and her team don’t acknowledge is that they deploy the same tactics with their film.

‘Depp v Heard’ is available on Channel 4