Jury Duty Is a Hilarious Mix of The Office and The Rehearsal, and It's Free to Watch

Have you ever found yourself in a situation so bizarre that you thought you must be in the middle of a sitcom or reality show? That's what happened to Ronald Gladden over the course of 17 days in 2021 when he was in jury duty during the selection process and witnessed the person next to him repeatedly falling asleep, another potential juror saying he's racist to try to get out of serving, and actor James Marsden acting like a prima donna, in disbelief that he has to be saddled with such plebeian matters. And you know what? Ronald was right. He was on a reality show, he just didn't know he was. 

Ronald is the unsuspecting star of Freevee's Jury Duty, a television experiment from producers of The Office and the second Borat movie that takes elements of both of those but spins it into one of the wildest shows of the year. While Ronald believed he was serving jury duty and participating in a documentary about the process, it was all fake. His fellow jurors, the lawyers, the bailiff, the judge, and others were all actors. The shenanigans were all partly scripted and improvised. Everyone was in on it except for him.

"The way we pitched the show, was 'What if you were making The Office and Jim was a real person who didn't know that Dwight was an actor?" executive producer Todd Schulman told TV Guide. Standing in as our Halpert-ian everyman, Ronald runs into all sorts of characters in the jury, like the weirdo who's into cybernetic body enhancements, the goody two-shoes whose girlfriend is clearly using his time away as an opportunity to cheat on him, and the older woman who gleefully combats her exhaustion with a cocktail of narcotics. 

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Executive producer Dave Bernad, fresh off the Netflix hit film Bad Trip, a hybrid scripted buddy comedy and daredevil prank show starring the always unpredictable Eric Andre, wanted to continue working in the genre, which he called incredibly difficult to produce but even more rewarding if you can pull it off. "I was really excited about taking this format, and creating a hero's journey for one real person, and if you put them in a sitcom and they're involved in a love triangle or they're involved in some sort of familiar conflict, how would they react? ... What would an everyday citizen do when confronted with what our trial confronts them with? And you know, we found a perfect hero in Ronald." 

In a show like this that's so meticulously put together by people behind the scenes, the great X factor is Ronald. You can't plan how he will react to the nonsense that's thrown at him, like a totally game Marsden, who's playing an exaggerated version of himself ("an entitled Hollywood jackass," as he puts it). But Ronald's mix of honesty, kindness, and morality proved to be perfect to keep the show moving forward, even if stories didn't go exactly where they thought it would go.

"He's such an empath and such a pure-hearted human being," Marsden told TV Guide. "The writers were writing something to purposely create some sort of comedic moment where our hero might be kind of off-put by this character, and instead, he put his arm around it, and embraced this guy." Marsden also noted that he wasn't interested in doing a prank show or humiliating Ronald. "But if we if we surround him with a ragtag group of wonderful weirdos, and create this hero's path for him to be the leader at the end of it, who kind of unites all of us and inspires all of us, then we've done our job, and hopefully it's a funny ride along the way." 

And funny it is. As much as it's a reality show with Ronald, it's also an improvisational sitcom loaded with talented little-known actors — they had to be, in order to keep Ronald in the dark — willing to play their parts and commit to the role. A handful of actors fully immersed themselves in the project, getting the complete juror experience by spending all 17 days in the hotel that Ronald was also staying at, so that the storylines and fun could continue (and be filmed) at all hours of the day and night. And because Ronald believed he was shooting a serious documentary, it was easy for the producers to film mockumentary-style confessionals to flesh out the storylines of each of the jurors, which span the spectrum of sexual frustration, run-ins with white supremacists, and gambling problems.

But with all these strange things constantly happening, didn't Ronald ever know something was happening? 

"At times, [Ronald] would say, 'I feel like I'm on a reality show,'" Marsden said. "When he did that, we would go, 'Hey, let's pull everything back. Get ready for five hours of droning on in court,' just to sort of ground it all." 

"There was a part of me that's kind of embarrassed when I watched it, because I was like, 'Oh, how did I not see all of this coming?" Ronald told TV Guide just before the series premiered. "But the way that this was filmed, they had professionals at every level set this up. ... So a part of me feels embarrassed. But then the other part of me looks at like the professionals that were involved in this. I'm like, well, I mean, I didn't really stand a chance, you know?" 

Jury Duty is now streaming on Freevee, Amazon's ad-supported streaming service. New episodes air Fridays.