Emmy spotlight: Amazon Freevee’s ‘Jury Duty’ deserves to be in the comedy conversation
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If you haven’t discovered the eight-part genre-bending comedy “Jury Duty” that started streaming April 7 on Amazon’s free streaming service Freevee, it’s time that you did. It’s been described as the world’s first feelgood prank show, and it’s all of that and more. Here the elevator pitch: “The Office” meets “The Truman Show.” Here’s the premise: A guy answers a Craigslist add looking for someone to participate in a filmed documentary about serving on a jury. What they don’t mention is that they would essentially be unwittingly performing in a sitcom that the person didn’t know was a sitcom and that everyone surrounding them – and we do mean everyone – was an actor.
That unsuspecting dupe happens to be a good-natured, game-for-anything young man named Ronald Gladden, and through the eight episodes of “Jury Duty” we follows his selection onto the purported jury and incredulity at all the weird situations and oddball characters surrounding him as the hoax trial moves forward. It’s somewhat similar to the premise of the mock reality show “The Joe Schmo Show” that turned up on the cable network Spike 20 years ago. A key difference with this show, however, is that Ronald is never made the butt of the joke and in fact is held up as something of a hero for his actions and reactions to the subtle chaos and absurdity in his midst.
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We follow this fake jury selection and fake trial through a fake verdict and ultimately a surprisingly touching and heartfelt reveal at the end. However, not even the revealing judge is real: Alan Barinholtz, a retired attorney and sometime actor trying out his improv chops for the first time. The whole enterprise turns out to be as hilarious as it is ingenious.
Here is what a good sport Ronald Gladden is: he eagerly participated last Wednesday night in a TV Academy FYC screening and panel in Hollywood designed to promote “Jury Duty’s” Emmy candidacy. A longshot? No question. But a deserving one. The series is singularly hilarious and masterfully produced, a triumph of superb planning and impeccable casting. At no one do the deadpan improv performers at the center of the comedy ever betray that this is anything other than a serious exercise in civic duty. That’s especially true of the actor James Marsden (“Dead to Me”), the de facto “star” of the series whose job it is basically to serve as a pretext for the action while playing an entitled, self-involved, narcissistic version of himself.
Since launching in April, the show has blown up into a social media sensation, generating more than 200 million views on TikTok. Co-creator Lee Eisenberg (a producer on “The Office”) said at the Wednesday FYC event that “Jury Duty” was an idea that he and his cocreator Gene Stupnitsky had been kicking around for a while. But they were thinking of a fully scripted series, not a mocumentary. Thery were approached by fellow producers Todd Schulman and Nick Hatton, who had the idea of doing it as a prank show where the prank continued through a full season.
After selling the idea to Freevee, showrunner Cody Heller said she was intrigued but terrified. “My background was fully in scripted comedy, and I had no idea if I could pull it off,” she admitted. “It was a total leap of faith. We built this little family of cast and crew, but then Ronald is what made this work. We were sending him on a hero’s journey. None of the situations we put him in were ever meant to be traumatic or uncomfortable or humiliating. The fact that he bonded (with his fellow “jurors”) was real. That wasn’t manufactured.
“Our whole idea was, imaging if ‘The Office’ were a real documentary, and everyone was an actor but Jim (John Krasinski) was a real person. The idea of having the star of a sitcom not know he was a star. In the case of Ronald, we got incredibly lucky, because he’s so natural; and such a pure soul. When the judge appointed him foreman of the jury, he really took it seriously. We were also lucky that James (Marsden) was so incredibly good. His improv skills had us in stitches every day.”
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The fact he was so good at the improv was a surprise to Marsden himself, since he admitted had never been taught improv rules. “I’d always loved that style of comedy, like ‘Larry Sanders’ and ‘The Office’,” he said last week. “But as much as you plan, you have to be quick on your feet and pivot. If you want to take a left turn and (Ronald) takes a right, you gotta go left. But here you are, locked in a room and having to stay in character five hours a day for three weeks while people drone on in court. It was not a glamorous job as I played the role of Jackass James Marsden.
“I’d told them I was not really interested in doing a prank show and turning the screws to somebody who was in the dark. I wasn’t interested in messing with someone’s human experience. But we were able to get to the finish line and celebrate this person of great humanity, character and empathy. I’m very proud of it.”
It was Marsden who supplied the pretext for the narrative. Because he was a “famous actor” constantly being chased by paparazzi. it was decided that his being on the jury necessitated the jury’s sequestration for three weeks in a hotel – the better to keep an eye on Ronald, of course. “We controlled every single element of Ronald’s life for those three weeks,” said executive producer Hatton. “It really was a matter of how we could create ‘The Truman Show’ for real with this smart, savvy, empathetic human being. And through luck and hard work, we were able to.”
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A large measure of that “luck” part was certainly hiring Susie Farris as the “Jury Duty” casting director. The collection of misfits she hired for the jury box is a thing of phony beauty. Farris, who also served as casting director on “The Conners,” is surely the show’s secret weapon and ought to be heading the show’s list of potential Emmy nominees. But would also be heartening to believe it had a shot at a darkest of dark horses Best Comedy Series nomination shot, too.
“Comedies have evolved over the past several years, and I think in some ways they’ve become really ambitious,” Eisenberg says. “‘The Bear’ is an incredible show. ‘Ted Lasso’ is taking swings that have never been done before. ‘Shrinking’ is great. What’s exciting to me about ‘Jury Duty’ is that we tried to come up with a show that generated laughs, had heart, and features characters with comedy engines. That to me is the sweet spot. People are reacting to our characters, reacting to Ronald, and that’s really everything we could hope for.”
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