Though if you ask professional jury consultants, someone plucked fresh from devouring Making a Murderer might not even make it past their first day of civic duty. “You would want to have the attorney ask: ‘How long did you watch it? With whom might you have had conversations about what you saw? Have you done anything in furtherance of your feelings about the show? For instance, some sort of social-media post,’” advises trial consultant Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, who’s helped select juries for clients representing both plaintiffs and defendants, notably including O.J. Simpson’s 1994 defense team. “By gaining that information, you’re going to get a good mind-set of [whether] they were biased in favor of Mr. Avery and against the prosecution or police.” Moreover, she projects that potential jurors’ familiarity with Making a Murderer in particular “will be a significant question on criminal cases from here on out. We used to ask those questions about CSI because it was pretty predictive of someone who was a defense-prone juror.”

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