‘Jury Duty’ series review: All rise for television’s most sincere prank show

A still from ‘Jury Duty’

‘Truth is stranger than fiction’ or for Ronald Gladden, it is stranger than a scripted reality show. As cameras follow him around, Ronald walks into the Huntington Park Superior Court to be part of a jury trial he has been called up for. Believing himself to be part of a documentary following the lives of jurors, he welcomes recording devices placed across the court premises. He chats up with fellow potential jurors, one of them being James Marsden, and looks forward to completing the trial and returning to his friends to tell them all about his small part in a documentary.

Except, all the cameras are really here to specifically focus on Ronald, who is now part of a fake trial, surrounded by actors acting as jurors in a fake court. Even James Marsden is acting to come across as a spoiled Hollywood star.

An unfortunate paparazzi incident (courtesy Marsden’s popularity) causes the ‘Judge’ to order the jurors to be sequestered for the remainder of the trial. Thus, in Amazon Freevee’s Jury Duty, Ronald — an ordinary solar panel contractor — becomes the puppet master for a motley crew of actors, as they display increasingly odd behaviour over 17 days of a court trial, aiming to elicit all kinds of reactions from him.

Over the course of eight episodes, the camera switches between a civil trial and the jurors’ time at the hotel where they have been equally sequestered. Both segments scripted to appal, confuse, and shock Ronald play out like a high-budget extended episode of Just for Laughs Gags.

The show is written to push Ronald into the spotlight, into awkward situations, and present him with ethical dilemmas. As the group grows tighter, his responsibilities grow more serious. One day he is coordinating the group’s lunch order, the next he is negotiating a very awkward breakup between a juror and his girlfriend. As the jurors exacerbate their idiosyncrasies, it is hilarious to witness Ronald suffer in silence, and with a near-constant smile, in front of the ‘documentary’ cameras.

However, you can only script to a certain extent when a chunk of your episode hinges on the reaction of one person. So, the crew (behind the cameras, as well as the actors in front of Ronald), continuously shift gears, change tones, and achieve feats of improvisation.

With hoax/prank shows like these, the audience are generally made to feel like one with the showrunners. We know that there is a hidden camera, that these are actors, that this is a fake scenario. However, Jury Duty only allows us into that inner sanctum for only a while.

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As days go by, Ronald, who believes himself to part of a real trial, begins to form genuine bonds with his fellow jurors. He helps Todd (the socially-awkward guy obsessed with cybernetics) get a makeover; he encourages Noah to believe in himself enough to ask another juror out; and he spends almost an entire day as a scene partner for Marsden’s audition tape. All these incidents are of course marked by the actors playing into their specific parts. Ronald would, honest to God, be anywhere but in the middle of being the fall guy for Marsden’s bad toilet etiquette. And yet, he turns up.

This is where the distance between us and the show begins to grow. The jurors, Ronald included, now form their own inner sanctum of an awkward but genuine friendship.

However, towards the end, the show does tend to slag a bit. The trial portion of the show inside the courtroom, is not able to entertain us in the same way, and outside the courtroom, this has become a remarkably different show than the one we started watching. Thankfully, this is also when the show starts to wrap up.

In what can be described as a mix between The Truman Show (1998) and Trial & Error (2017), Jury Duty provides eight hours of easy bliss. The show wears its heart on its sleeve to convince us that there are people in the world that can help us play our best selves, that can make us act out the better parts of our nature.

Jury Duty is currently streaming on Prime Video