NBC’s hilarious legal mockumentary Trial & Error was cut criminally short after its second season, but at least it ended on a high note – here’s how the season 2 finale wrapped up the show. A spoof of true crime documentaries and reality legal shows, Trial & Error starred Gotham’s Nicholas D’Agosto as Josh Segal, a New York City lawyer who relocates to a small South Carolina town where he defends oddball locals with the help of an equally quirky defense team.
In the first season of Trial & Error, Josh defended an eccentric local college professor and poet named Larry Henderson. Played by John Lithgow, Larry was accused and convicted of murdering his wife but exonerated after Josh discovered her death was a freak accident involving an owl in a trial that true crime fans will recognize as parodying the Michael Peterson case and documentary The Staircase. Trial & Error season 1 also saw Josh get a little more acquainted than was probably professional with the prosecution, East Peck’s district attorney Carol Anne Keane (Jayma Mays).
Trial & Error’s second season featured a new client and brand-new murder case – that of East Peck socialite and heiress Lavinia Peck-Foster (Kristin Chenoweth) who was accused of murdering her husband after his body was found stuffed in a suitcase in the trunk of her car. Josh’s season 2 journey was complicated by the fact Carol Anne was now heavily pregnant and there was a one in six chance he was the father.
Spoofing The Jinx documentary and the Robert Durst case, it turned out that people around Lavinia had a nasty habit of turning up dead. Josh soon discovered Lavinia was guilty of murdering not only her husband but his lover/assistant too but only after helping her walk out of court a free woman. Not long after a whole lot of East Peck residents who could’ve provided proof of Lavinia’s guilt started getting murdered including local tattoo artist Reverend James Tats, town forger Forge Clooney and East Peck’s Groundhog Day-like town mascot Mickey Moose. Josh also suspected Lavinia was responsible for the murder of her brother Chet and setting up town tinfoil hat wearer Jesse Ray Beaumont (Michael Hitchcock) to take the fall.
By the Trial & Error season 2 finale, Josh had worked out Lavinia murdered Chet because he was hiding letters sent from the son she had in her teens and was forced to give up and send to Barcelona to maintain the Peck family name. Josh coerced a confession out of the socialite serial killer and also found out he wasn’t the father of Carol Anne’s baby, which he seemed pretty bummed about. Although Lavinia was jailed for the many murders she committed, she somehow managed to escape prison and make her way to Barcelona presumably to look for her long-lost son.
At the very end of Trial & Error’s second season, the show dropped some hints as to what might’ve been in store for season 3 with a reference to witch trials and the so-called East Peck Three which suggested a spoof of the true crime documentary Paradise Lost and the case of the West Memphis Three. Unfortunately, after the show’s premature cancellation, Trial & Error season 3 will never be.
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