Jury Duty might be the world’s first feel-good prank show
Occasionally confusing but almost always nice, Freevee's new reality series avoids the abuse that plagued predecessors like The Joe Schmo Show
Two decades ago, Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese—aka the guys behind the Deadpool movies—created a series called The Joe Schmo Show where one real guy competed on a completely phony reality show where everyone but him was an actor. It was a lot of fun right up until the moment it became clear that it was also very mean. Joe Schmo hadn’t done anything to anyone, and while he did get the ultimate prize that he thought he was competing for, it still felt uncomfortably manipulative by the end.
That sort of thing has been attempted a few times since, most notably in Joe Schmo sequel shows with slightly different premises, and it has since been completely replaced by wholly fictional shows that present themselves like documentaries—poking fun at the reality concept without bullying anyone—but the reason that concept doesn’t work so well anymore might not be because it’s too mean. Based on Amazon Freevee’s new comedy series Jury Duty, it might actually be because today’s Joe Schmoes are too eager to accept the outrageous behavior of their fellow man. Bizarre as it may seem, we as a society may have simply become too nice.
The premise of Jury Duty is as elegant as it is weirdly complex: Under the impression that he’s participating in a documentary about the jury duty process, normal guy Ronald shows up to do his part in supporting the American justice system. Unbeknownst to him, everyone he interacts with from that point on—the bailiff, the judge, the other potential jurors he sees in the waiting room—are all actors. The show even cleverly lampshades this by making one of the potential jurors an actual actor: James Marsden, playing a more pretentious version of himself, as he repeatedly tries to get out of jury duty so he can get to a big audition.
An early scene when all of the jurors are mingling in a waiting room is the most dynamic one in the whole season, because it’s one of the few times where everything that happens is dependent on how Ronald reacts to the world that Jury Duty has created around him. James Marsden the character is mildly offended that Ronald doesn’t immediately recognize him, but Marsden the actor is clearly tickled by the fact that Ronald eventually puts it together that he was in Sex Drive—a movie that gets referenced more times in this series than ever before in history.