What elevates ‘Jury Duty’ from TV prank show to life-affirming joy

There is a moment in Jury Duty, the Truman Show-esque comedy series set in a municipal court in Los Angeles, when jury foreman Ronald turns to fellow juror Noah and says: “This is like a reality show.”

As he utters the words, time seems to stop. Is the game up? Has Ronald worked out what is happening when his back is turned? But then he lets the thought go and moves on. And so continues one of the most inspired TV comedy shows of the year.

In Jury Duty, viewers are in on the stunt from the off. What is purportedly a documentary on the US justice system, as seen through the eyes of a jury, is in fact an elaborately choreographed fake. Everyone involved is an actor, bar one person: 30-year-old solar panel installer Ronald Gladden.

Over the next eight episodes, Ronald is the straight man amid a sea of clowns. These include pensioner Barbara, whose habit of napping in court threatens to derail the case; Noah, who discovers that his girlfriend, in his absence, is holidaying with an Instagram beefcake called Cody; Todd, a cybernetics nut who insists on bringing into the courtroom his oddball inventions which include “chair pants”, two crutches attached to his backside for leaning on when there are no chairs (there are always chairs).

Central to its appeal is the element of jeopardy, the audience knowing that with one false move the whole thing could unravel

Viewers have been slow to wake up to Jury Duty’s understated brilliance. The series arrived in early April on Amazon Freevee to little fanfare; the reviews, of which there were few, were mostly lukewarm. But since then, it has been steadily building an audience on TikTok where, at the time of writing, clips of the show have been viewed more than 441mn times.

Jury Duty isn’t the first show to have benefited from the power of TikTok. The same happened to the Addams Family spin-off Wednesday, released on Netflix last November, after the lead character’s prom dance, choreographed by actress Jenna Ortega, went viral on the platform.

But while it’s easy to see how a young woman dancing to The Cramps in goth get-up might strike a chord with Gen-Z, the lure of Jury Duty is more opaque. So how did the series beguile the TikTok generation?

Perhaps it’s because, despite its obvious mockumentary and prank-show roots, it feels like it is doing something unusual. There are shades of last year’s The Rehearsal, a TV show-cum-social experiment in which Nathan Fielder helps participants navigate difficult human interactions by rehearsing every possible outcome. But where that series came over as a largely intellectual exercise, Jury Duty never loses sight of its fundamental function as entertainment.

Also central to its appeal is the element of jeopardy: its success depends on Ronald being an oblivious pawn, and the audience knowing that with one false move the whole thing could unravel. Not for nothing did scores of networks pass on the show before it found a home on the no-cost Freevee; for many, the risk of the scales suddenly falling from Ronald’s eyes was too great.

It doesn’t hurt to have a star on board, of course. That star is the X-Men and Westworld actor James Marsden, who gamely plays a preening, attention-seeking and generally atrocious version of himself. As the jurors are selected, he tries to wriggle out of doing his civic duty on the basis that he’s a “recognisable public figure” and would therefore be a distraction, furtively inviting paparazzi to the courthouse to prove his point. But rather than dismiss him, the judge orders that the jurors be sequestered in a hotel. Thus the set-up, in which surveillance can continue after-hours, is complete.

In the final episode of Jury Duty, the curtain is pulled back, Wizard of Oz-style, to reveal producers in front of banks of screens often doubled up with laughter. And it’s here that we fully appreciate Jury Duty’s secret weapon. We may never know whether it was dumb luck or savvy calculation that led the show’s creators to Ronald, their unwitting main character. Where a lesser man might have lost his cool with sleepy Barbara, or Todd’s bizarre inventions, or James’s rampaging ego, the sweet, patient Ronald goes out of his way to accommodate their eccentricities, going so far as to invite Todd to his room to watch A Bug’s Life to let him know it’s OK to be different.

With Ronald at the centre, what might have been an ethically dubious experiment and an exercise in extreme discomfort has turned out to be both funny and life-affirming. If the show has a message, it’s perhaps that we should all be a little more Ronald.

Available now on Amazon Freevee