In a World Run by Monsters, 'Jury Duty' Restores Our Faith in Humanity

It’s hard to stay hopeful these days, a time when the world is one unhinged tweet away from Armageddon. When the world is run by war criminals and felonious reality television stars, hope comes in the unlikely form of another reality television star named Anthony Norman, an unsuspecting hero made to believe he’s working as a temp administrative assistant for a family-owned hot sauce company. Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat is the second season follow-up to 2023’s Jury Duty, where one participant was a juror in a made-up trial where everyone around him was an actor, including actual Hollywood actor James Marsden, who cameos as a parody of himself. If you haven’t caught the first season, it’s a perfect time to get caught up because the entire concept of the show is predicated on the unerring goodness of its main character, and it’s the good vibes we sorely need.

Jury Duty is part Truman Show, part Last One Laughing (another Prime Video gem), as the show’s clueless protagonist is surrounded by actors playing normal people who say or do the most unwittingly hilarious things. It’s very much unlike most American reality television shows that thrive on conflict and drama, brought about by intentionally casting the most odious, guileful, or self-centered people and dropping them in powder keg situations. Jury Duty’s greatest strength is finding the most stellar example of humanity and surrounding them with flawed individuals and putting them in hilarious, yet high-stress situations that allow man’s capacity for compassion, kindness, and understanding to shine. 

There’s no schadenfreude here. If other reality television makes a spectacle of people doing unsavory things behind other people’s backs or making the firing of an employee a highlight, Jury Duty is the complete opposite. Every episode gives the hero a chance to do the right thing, almost always with no benefit to themselves and sometimes even to their own detriment. In Company Retreat, Anthony believes that he’s only a temp hire, an HR assistant only working with Rockin’ Grandma’s Hot Sauce for two weeks, giving him no real incentive to go above and beyond for the company. Like the first season, there’s a camera crew that follows them around under the pretense of making a documentary, so Anthony never suspects a thing. The unsuspecting Anthony gets thrown into entertaining situations where he shows again and again that kindness goes a long way, and it’s the most refreshing thing on television.

Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat ups the ante from the first season, and the setting has moved from a closed set to a resort in the mountains. The show also introduces an actual villain in the form of a company called the Triukas Group, which is set to buy Rockin’ Grandmas Hot Sauce from its owners, the Womack family. The folks from Triukas are suspicious corporate folks who have secret plans to scrap the hot sauce business and get rid of all its employees, and it’s a testament to the show’s meticulous planning that Anthony gets wind of this plan.

A companion series that delves into the making of the show, hosted by Season 1’s guest star James Marsden, goes into detail about the painstaking process that goes into crafting a fake reality for its hero. From casting to production to the placement of multiple hidden cameras to the precise blocking and timing of conversations that happen around Anthony, Jury Duty is a masterpiece of planning. The situations thrown Anthony’s way get progressively more ridiculous that there’s always the danger of him cottoning on the whole plot, but he never gets close to suspecting a thing. Part of it is the production’s masterful engineering of the show, and part of it is because Anthony is so humble, trusting, and innately good that it never crosses his mind that he’s part of a mockumentary centered on himself. 

Anthony Norman, just like the first season’s Ronald Gladden before him, is a wonderful human being. This is high but deserved praise in a time when hate and aggression are normalized, when those who occupy the highest seats in the land talk unkindly and threaten others so often that it seems like kindness and decorum feel like relics of a bygone era. People like Anthony and Ronald may genuinely be rare, but the best thing about Jury Duty is that it reminds us that people like them still exist. In a world steeped in conflict and where we’re too busy thinking about our own survival and well-being, Jury Duty shows us that goodness can be its own reward. In Anthony’s case, goodness also resulted in a real reward of $150,000 at the end of the season when it was finally revealed to him that he was the star of a television show. Audiences seeing Anthony get rewarded for simply being his own, good self will feel a genuine sense of freudenfreude, the opposite of schadenfreude, where one feels joy in others’ success and happiness. Anthony is the unlikely hero you can’t help but cheer for, and it’s genuinely moving when the actors reveal themselves and tell him that his goodness touched their lives.

Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat is the retreat from reality that we need, a show that features only one real person playing himself, and he’s enough to show us that maybe the world hasn’t gone completely mad. The entire Jury Duty series, including its companion behind-the-scenes show, is light television fare that helps ease the constant uncertainty that seems to permeate our everyday lives. We need fewer despots, pedophiles, and warmongers in charge of the world; we need fewer people to fear and despise; we need more people like Anthony Norman and Ronald Gladden to inspire us and remind us that the best of humanity can be found in the most unexpected places.

ALSO READ:

Netflix's Hyperdrive is the Reality Show Version of Fast and Furious. Because Why the Hell Not?

Netflix's New Reality Show Is Going to Be Insanely Controversial