Between The Office and The Truman Show: discover Jury Duty, the craziest series of the year

A trial where everyone is an actor, with the exception of a juror. Part of The Office team is in charge of this delirious true/false reality TV concept, now available on Prime Video.

When it was launched in early April via Freevee, Amazon’s free platform (not available in France), Jury Duty rose to the top of the most streamed programs. The result is a golden concept: a documentary on the work of the jury during an ordinary trial in Los Angeles, except that everything is bogus – case, plaintiff, defendant, judge, magistrates… – except for a juror. Ronald, that is his name, is therefore the subject despite himself of a variation on the Truman Show aiming not to maintain in him the illusion of an idealized reality, but on the contrary to disrupt its order to make it slide towards the surreal, the only limit being the credulity of the guinea pig. And if the series manages to make the boy accept a copious ration of absurd events – sexual setbacks, a “misterbeanesque” lawyer, freakish jurors, the presence of a star (James Marsden in his own role)… – it is in entrusting him with the role of the nice big brother of the madmen.

A role that he will assume far beyond expectations, as when he shows the most weirdo of his court colleagues – a sort of sickly and autistic Geo Trouvetou – a DVD of 1001 Paws to help him accept his difference. The concept is therefore somewhat forgotten behind the gallery of characters as cast as employees of The Office (whose former collaborators are here at the helm); and over-out is never used to cultivate unease or embarrassment, the series having had the intelligence to choose a character who is completely foreign to these emotions, a model of a healthy reaction to the absurd. And the real subject is undoubtedly there: how to coexist well with madness. Absolute prohibition to make fun of it, quasi moral obligation to laugh about it. A season 2 of Jury Duty is already under discussion.

Jury Duty, created by Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, to see on Prime Video.