Jury Duty review fake trial prank comedy show courts few laughs

James Marsden plays himself in an unusual mockumentary series that places a real person in the middle of a made-up trial with middling results

With the head of a hidden-camera prank show, the heart of a workplace sitcom, and the body of a true crime documentary, the boundary-blurring new comedy Jury Duty makes for an odd chimera of genres.

The original series released by Freevee (the Amazon-owned streaming platform formerly known as IMDb TV) follows a court case from start to finish, its proceedings turned into farce by a boneheaded defendant, a bumbling lawyer, a bailiff at the end of her rope, and a boxful of kooky jurors. The simple pleasures of the half-hour hangout show – in which a shared location and occupational purpose knit a loose collection of people into a dysfunctional surrogate family – combine with the vicarious fun of armchair investigation for a hybrid that can seamlessly cater to multiple on-trend viewing blocs. In algorithmese, we’d describe this pairing of crime-and-punishment suspense with absurd public-service drudgery as “recommended for fans of Making a Murderer and Parks and Recreation”.

That recipe for success proved effective when NBC’s short-lived, tragically underappreciated Trial and Error did it first in 2017, but Jury Duty distinguishes itself with an additional hook. Everyone’s in on the joke except for one fellow by the name of Ronald, an average guy – to whatever extent an Angeleno eager enough to get on camera that he’d sign up for something like this can be considered “average” – unaware that the non-fiction project about jurisprudence he thought he’d volunteered for has been fully scripted and cast with actors. The production crew went to great lengths to preserve their ruse, sequestering eventual foreperson Ronald and his fellow jurors for weeks without cellphones or any other means of contacting the outside world. Yet their all-in commitment on making this odd experiment work often supersedes the cause of being funny, its novel gambit in service of gags not necessarily bettered by their unwitting straight man.

Incredulity being what it is, maybe no sane person could or would or should dare to look through their reality as a sham designed specifically to mess with them. All the same, it’s hard to believe that Ronald never had an inkling of something off about the cameras permitted to tape the inner workings of a private deliberation. His so-called peers have each been sketched around a single, legible shtick in the same manner as supporting characters on TV, one cybernetics-obsessed nerd unmistakable as a writerly invention. And they sometimes fit into steadily paced episode-to-episode arcs, in particular the nervous virgin ensorcelled by a more experienced maneater who trains her sights on him from day one. The defendant, an allegedly negligent factory employee facing a suit the show spends less time developing than its interpersonal dynamics, represents himself by running back and forth between the witness stand and the counsel’s bench in a routine straight out of the Marx Bros. After another hijink, Ronald chuckles that “this literally feels like reality TV”. If he only knew!

Unlike the marks scared shitless by Eric Andre or humiliated by Sacha Baron Cohen, he receives the mild antics thrust upon him with unflagging politeness, a quality the final episode of the show rewards in perplexing fashion. With no inherent hilarity in his obliviousness, getting the odd laugh falls to the stealth players around him, best among them James Marsden as an insecure, preening, vainglorious parody of himself. The one-liners at his expense – his appearance in the cancellation-ripe Sex Drive, the general suckitude of Sonic the Hedgehog, the emasculation of being the non-Ryan Gosling love interest in The Notebook – pack a valid wallop, and he dives into his self-effacement with a game attitude. Here, the ironic distance between the fakery onscreen and our awareness of it plays as a comic bit, as opposed to a neat parlor trick.

The last of the eight episodes functions as a behind-the-scenes reunion show, breaking down the invisible labor required to pull off an outing to Margaritaville or a simple lunch order. The showrunners, Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, watch over all the courtroom action from a panopticon of monitors down the hall, their selection of CCTV angles reproducing the visual vocabulary of the mockumentary that they helped to codify during their time on The Office. We’re shown backstage footage of the pair and their staffers cracking up at their own mischief, barely stifling the doubled-over hysterics for fear of shattering the illusion. That pride in their sneaky handiwork comes across loud and clear through the rest of the show, though for us at home, the elaborate put-on adds little entertainment value in comparison with a fully fictive version. The cast and crew bend over backwards to contrive set-ups that aspire to the shape of unremarkable premises; wouldn’t it have been easier, and perhaps more productive, to just write a scene with a relatable everyman trying to keep a snoozing oldster awake through the testimonies?

This final episode takes a hard swerve towards sentimentality, positing that Ronald’s manufactured circumstances nonetheless created authentic bonds with his comrades. One might think that in fact they didn’t, that he’d feel some sense of betrayal at having opened up to people lying to him, or that at least he’d be pissed about still being eligible for bona fide jury duty. His gracious reaction might come as a surprise, but on several fronts, this seems like the kind of thing where you just had to be there.

• Jury Duty is available on Freevee on 7 April

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