Emmy’s Hilarious Dark Horse Comedy Contender ‘Jury Duty’ Takes Case To Voters; Chastain & Shannon On ‘George & Tammy’ And Why They May Be Back Together On Broadway Next – Notes On The Season
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A column chronicling events and conversations on the awards circuit.
So now, as they say, is crunch time as this column leads into the first weekend where 20,000-plus eligible Emmy voters (I am but one of them) have ballots if not in hand then at least on their laptop and can begin voting in the categories they are eligible to judge. All members get to weigh in on the program categories. Others, depending on their branch (I am in the Writers Branch and a former Governor there) also get to vote on their branch selections.
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The ballots went live Thursday and of course have all the usual suspects and obvious front-runners to choose from. The sheer number of voters, and the overwhelming amount of content thrown at voters during the very long Emmy season that started six months ago, simply tends to favor the best-known and most-written-about programs. So as my colleague (and Deadline TV critic) Dominic Patten and I have been discussing on our weekly TV Talk podcast, the leading candidates are obvious.
In Drama Series it is HBO’s to lose thanks to the likes of Succession and The White Lotus, both big winners last year (Lotus has been re-catergorized from Limited Series to Drama Series much to the objection of its producers, one of whom told me they appealed the decision to no avail more than once). In Comedy Series, any newcomer has to face Apple TV+ juggernaut Ted Lasso in supposedly its third and final season after winning the past two years in a row. Then we have the stalwarts like Barry, Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Only Murders in the Building, Abbott Elementary etc., etc. Newcomers with lots of heat over the past year could break through into one of the eight spots like Netflix’s Wednesday, Apple TV+’s Shrinking (also from the Lasso producers), Hulu’s award-winning The Bear, Peacock’s Poker Face among others. I would have added even Hulu’s very funny Reboot, but it was wrongly canceled after just eight episodes and thus doesn’t have a prayer.
CAN A LONG SHOT GO ALL THE WAY FOR COMEDY SERIES? THE JURY IS OUT
But here is my pitch: What if a genuine long shot, but a totally deserving one that is actually going viral lately, came up on the inside in a late-breaking bid to get into genuine contention? It ain’t easy. First of all, there are 95 entries for Outstanding Comedy Series this year (though that is down from last year). The odds favor the known entities; like voters in every walk of life, political or showbiz or whatever, they tend go with brand names. Donald Trump may be a nightmare but he is a brand name, so that is what the GOP “base” seems to favor. Even a savvy betting site like my PMC colleagues at Gold Derby have over 50 of those 95 Comedy entries on their even possible list. But what about the impossible list? That is what I will be shilling for today.
The series is on Freevee (say what?), the Amazon free-streaming offshoot. It is called Jury Duty, an eight-episode Freevee Original that I only picked up on a couple of weeks ago when I watched episode 1 after hearing people talking about it. It was quite simply the single funniest show I had seen on television in years — I mean laugh out loud funny to the point I insisted my wife watch it with me and so I immediately watched it again, then episode 2 (just as funny) and so on. It is so original and different, and unique to the point the producers told me they don’t even know if there could ever be a Season 2 because of the degree of difficulty in pulling it off. Could lightning even strike twice with something like this?
Jury Duty centers on a courtroom trial that is completely fake, not real, but has been scripted with all actors except one lone juror, Ronald Gladden, who thinks this is actually the real deal. He is the only person in the show who is not an actor, but rather as he told me at the FYC event for the show on Wednesday at the Pendry Hotel in West Hollywood was selected to go through the jury process and then asked by a documentary crew (fake of course) if he would participate in their documentary chronicling the jury duty process. This was the ingenious way producers can put him on camera with no suspicions on his part; at times there were also anywhere from four to 35 hidden cameras working in the courtroom.
Everyone else was an actual actor including James Marsden playing himself — but a version of himself where he is, well, kind of a nightmare self-absorbed actor who winds up stuck in the jury process. During selection, the judge (brilliantly played by Alan Barinholtz, father of Ike and a career lawyer who only recently turned to acting in his 70s) asks Marsden, “Have you ever been on a jury before?” to which the actor replies, “Yes. In Cannes,” “France?” a lawyer incredulously asks. “Yes. The film festival,” Marsden replies with deadpan precision. See the trailer below.
The series was created by the veteran comedy team of Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky (The Office) and was scripted to allow for improv among the actors who, like everyone else involved, were walking a tightrope where at any moment with a wrong move the jig might be up if Ronald suspected anything. In fact the whole enterprise was a risk unlike anything I have seen. Some days they just had to do six hours of boring courtroom testimony and business so as to make sure Ronald never doubted this wasn’t all real. The casting of the actors, and of the juror not in on the joke, was crucial. And they could not cast immediately recognizable actors (except Marsden) for risk of Ronald spotting one. It is great the Emmys have a casting category because Casting Director Susie Farris deserves to run away with it.
It is really too bad the Emmys, like the Oscars, don’t have an Ensemble acting category because this group of actors truly deserves it — the absolute definition of ensemble acting, each dependent on the other. SAG and Critics Choice do have one and this show should not be forgotten when those awards come around again.
At Jury Duty‘s well attended FYC event, Marsden and Gladden appeared along with actors Susan Berger and Cassandra Blair. Also on the panel were director-executive producer Jake Szymanski, EP Dave Bernad (who also works on The White Lotus) and Farris. At the reception, Szymanski told me post-production was more like editing a documentary. They had hundreds of hours of footage to go through and piece together into individual episodes, totally unlike your average comedy series.
Earlier that day, Amazon launched a taco truck giveaway around L.A. courthouses offering free tacos for real jury members and court staff. Several of the actors turned up for that launch in Studio City. It has continued through the rest of this week at other locations, tied to a bit in the first episode where Marsden (who gets chosen as an alternate and has to be sequestered with the jury anyway without getting to chime in), in an attempt to impress the judge and get off jury duty, offers to buy all the jurors tacos during their lunch break to show what a good guy he is.
For Marsden, this was all going into uncharted territory, and he almost asked the showrunners if they were really sure they wanted him.
“I mean, I think we were collectively all feeling the same thing, which was, what are we doing? And how do we get to the finish line? Is this something that’s going to be funny? Is it going to be?,” Marsden said at the FYC event. “Because when I spoke with Dave and and Lee and Gene early on, they made it very clear that this is not a prank show. We’re not trying to turn the screws to some guy who didn’t ask for it. What it was was creating a hero’s journey for somebody. And I was like, well, that’s nice you know, that’s it. That’s a nice endeavor, but how do we do that? And also how to be funny and be fun. So I guess part of what’s going on in my mind was I was excited to get in the room with all these actors … and sort of fly by the seat of my pants. But I wasn’t prepared for the other thing, which is this high wire act. This download of live theater where we have this wild animal and we’re all in a cage together, and he’s the sweetest most pure hearted wild animal… I’ve never done anything like this before. Nobody had. We discussed that every day.”
Marsden added that the writing was key, even if it didn’t look written. “Every day going in not knowing what you would expect, but still having a plan,” he said. “The architecture, the scripts, were brilliant. I mean, I read the seven scripted episodes. Finally the eighth, which is obviously how it’s all done and everything, and I was howling with laughter. The writers don’t get enough credit for this show.”
I am told episode 5 is the one submitted for a writing Emmy. Eisenberg and Stupnitsky couldn’t participate in the panel due to the WGA strike, so the actors sang their praises to make sure people understood how important this riskiest of risky projects could be. Marsden, by the way, is only on Gold Derby’s list of Comedy Supporting Actors for Dead to Me, but they are missing the boat. Playing a twisted version of himself here may be the best work he has ever done.
I would suggest if voters are looking for a hidden gem they should check out Jury Duty. At the very least you will get a few laughs which ultimately, for me, is what a comedy series should be all about above all else.
***
MICHAEL & JESSICA ON CHANNELING GEORGE & TAMMY
Just before I headed over to the Jury Duty FYC, I was on the other side of town at Casa Del Mar for a chat with George & Tammy stars Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain, who were in town this week to talk up the Showtime limited series in which they are both so brilliant as country superstars George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Both had come from New York City where Shannon’s first directorial effort, Eric Larue, had world premiered at the Tribeca Festival, and Chastain had just wrapped her Broadway run in A Doll’s House (when we sat down in a booth I told her she was robbed; Jodie Comer took the Tony for Lead Actress). Shannon basically said the same thing as he sat down with us.
Both Chastain and Shannon have been universally praised for George & Tammy, which Chastain has been attached to and developing for a decade just as she did for The Eyes of Tammy Faye which won her an Oscar. Shannon has been Oscar nominated twice but has not yet been nominated for an Emmy among his many individual awards. That is a fact not lost on Chastain when it comes to Shannon — she even took me out of his earshot to ask how she could get it out there that he has never, not once, been Emmy nominated, and her only wish is that this is the performance that gets him in contention. This would actually be a first Emmy nomination for either of them, but she is laser-focused on seeing him honored.
I had talked with Chastain in New York for an episode of my video series Behind the Lens, and there she raved about what Shannon does in this role that she had hoped would reunite the pair who first worked together in 2011’s Take Shelter. With highly dramatic scenes, both also did their own singing — no easy trick considering how well known the country stars were. Plus, they had to perform songs live in front of an audience. They both said they weren’t aiming to do impersonations, just getting to the essence of what made them so great. T Bone Burnett was among the famous musicians who offered guidance. All you need to do is see the show to see they indeed pulled this off.
RELATED: Jessica Chastain On Her Year Of An Oscar Win, A Tony Nomination And Emmy Buzz – Behind The Lens
Chastain said the one moment that terrified her was when they went to Nashville recently to appear on the Country Music Awards. She was nervous about going to the heart of the world of Jones and Wynette, but they were generously received with stars like Miranda Lambert telling them how great they were.
Both have sung before (Chastain most recently as Tammy Faye), but this was in a whole other league. Shannon actually set out in school and later with musical pursuits, and even is in a band now having become an accomplished musician in his own right when he is not acting.
Chastain brought up technical aspects of singing in movies, saying she learned they sometimes blend voices with the originals and other tricks. That wasn’t the case in George & Tammy. Both did all their own singing, no net required. In that regard, we talked about the scary ways AI can be used now, musically and otherwise, and Chastain sees it as a significant threat to her profession if used incorrectly. Of course, that is one of the key contract points the current SAG-AFTRA contract negotiations are taking on.
“That is why I like being on the stage, doing theatre. You can’t use AI,” she told me, with Shannon agreeing theatre is the purest form of acting. He won a Tony for Long Day’s Journey Into Night in 2016, and was most recently on Broadway in 2019 in Frankie & Johnnie in the Clair De Lune. Both told me they are cooking up their next collaboration, which should come a couple of years from now back on Broadway. They have a plan and can’t wait to get on stage together, continuing this acting partnership from movies to television and hopefully the stage.
Something to look forward to indeed.
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