“Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat” and Age of the Prestige Prank Show
Three years ago, the quasi-scripted comedy “Jury Duty,” an unassuming offering on the now defunct streaming service Freevee, became a social-media sensation through its particular brand of gentle brazenness. Its creators, Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, Frankensteined the series by stitching together two moribund TV genres—the mockumentary sitcom and the prank show—to construct something new, if still lumbering. Cameras followed a handful of actors serving as the jurors in a fake trial alongside one unwitting civilian, a thirty-year-old solar contractor named Ronald Gladden, who believed that he was taking part in a straightforward documentary about the workings of the justice system. Surrounded by weirdos, losers, and a preening movie star (James Marsden, playing a fame-monster version of himself), Ronald spent three eventful weeks on his very own “Truman Show.” At one point, he came perilously close to the truth, declaring, “This literally feels like reality TV.”
Since the days of “Candid Camera,” a practical-joke program that began on the radio in 1947 and jumped to television the following year, prank shows have been critiqued for their exploitative dynamics. “Jury Duty” strives to reassure the audience by portraying its production as a fair trade: though the show deceives its main character, it also presents him in a favorable light, takes pains to minimize his distress, and insures that jokes are never at his expense. (Gladden also received a hundred thousand dollars and an over-all deal at Amazon for his trouble.) The series’ carefully curated feel-good vibes seemed to exceed even the novel premise as the primary source of its appeal: one review praised its “life-affirming joy.” But that very quality renders the follow-up, the awkwardly titled “Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat,” unnecessary. Like so many sitcoms before it, it withers under the force of its own unrelenting sunniness.
The sophomore season, now streaming on Prime Video, features a whole new cast, who play the tight-knit employees of a Los Angeles-based hot-sauce company called Rockin’ Grandma’s. Ronald’s successor at the center of the story is Anthony Norman, another young man with an open face and an inviting disposition. Early on, Anthony is told by the company’s H.R. chief, Kevin (Ryan Perez), that he’s been hired as a temp to help out at the annual staff retreat—the last such event for the firm’s founder, Doug (Jerry Hauck), who plans to retire. Poised to take over is his thirtysomething son, Dougie (Alex Bonifer), a failed ska-E.D.M. musician with a mop of bleached hair to match, who intends to implement some changes to the family business.
Season 2’s grander ambitions are evident from the start. While the original “Jury Duty” largely took place in a courtroom and in a hotel where the jurors were sequestered, leaving the cast drably entrapped, “Company Retreat” feels less cloistered. The employees of Rockin’ Grandma’s roam the grounds of the retreat site, which boasts multiple structures, and are visited by a series of guest speakers whose lectures range from the merely dull to the truly Dada. After Dougie bombs a presentation and gets dressed down by his father, he flees into the nearby hills to lick his wounds. The actors’ hours-long commitment to the bit continues through meticulously choreographed stunts and persists even when they leave Anthony’s sight line.
These hyper-dedicated cast members are “Company Retreat” ’s greatest asset. Rockin’ Grandma’s is compared, without irony, to a family, and its “employees” feel more distinctive than the stock types who populated the first season. The most memorable include a warehouse manager named Jimmy (Jim Woods), who’s intent on reforming his boorish ways but still can’t help blurting out faux pas, as when he calls Martin Luther King, Jr., “the Tom Brady of civil rights.” A receptionist and aspiring snack-fluencer, PJ (Marc-Sully Saint-Fleur), who offers Anthony some octopus-wasabi chips on his first day, could be the most popular guy in any workplace. Even Dougie, an inveterate screwup, isn’t without hidden depths—and Anthony, a natural hype man for whoever’s around, takes his plea for emotional support seriously, quickly becoming invested in a twisty succession crisis.
Eisenberg and Stupnitsky cut their teeth in the writers’ room of “The Office,” and “Company Retreat” occasionally evokes the misadventures of a young Jim Halpert, who tries to politely stifle his laughter while the people around him engage in delusional or over-the-top behavior. Anthony’s tolerance for nonsense is clear on Day One, when he high-fives Kevin for planning to propose to a co-worker in front of the entire staff. It soon emerges that the pair hadn’t even been on a single date, and the public proposal goes accordingly. But the incident doesn’t seem to affect Anthony’s regard for the head of H.R., or his esteem for the company as a whole. Too often, the season asks the audience to see this as evidence of Anthony’s unstinting optimism, rather than the quality they must have cast him for: an apparent inability to recognize red flags.
“Jury Duty” ’s blend of comedy and reality has garnered comparisons to “The Rehearsal,” in which Nathan Fielder mounts elaborate run-throughs of difficult situations. Both series, building on the work of Sacha Baron Cohen, could be thought of as a new breed: the prestige prank show, which utilizes practical jokes to get at higher truths. Baron Cohen is best known for the “Borat” movies, in which he plays a disarming lout whose antics expose the prejudices and injustices that his targets are willing to accept or partake in. Where he stitches together one-off encounters, Fielder, Eisenberg, and Stupnitsky devise sustained, full-immersion experiments with the potential to change the lives of their subjects. In the first season of “The Rehearsal,” participants use their practice sessions to allay anxieties or to optimize strategies. In the second, Fielder takes this to a systems-level extreme, suggesting that playacting among pilots could break down the hierarchical cockpit dynamics that he believes correlate with plane crashes.
Though Fielder’s methods and hypotheses are frequently absurd, he captures something real about human nature. The regular people featured in “The Rehearsal” don’t always come off looking good: many are stiff, strange, or downright dickish. “Jury Duty,” whose scripts refer to the unsuspecting main character as the “Hero,” is hamstrung by its insistence on protecting its protagonist. When the show received a Peabody Award, in 2024, it was commended for illustrating that reality television can “bring out the best in all of us.” But this, too, is a consequence of casting—and of producers and editors working overtime to hide the seams that someone like Fielder might prefer to flaunt. Anthony’s decency is a foregone conclusion; in fact, he never exhibits anything less. To stack the deck further, and to spur their champion into action, the writers throw in a sinister trio of private-equity investors who might as well arrive twirling their mustaches. If Dougie can’t hack it as Rockin’ Grandma’s next C.E.O., the vultures are more than ready to swoop in.
It isn’t hard to buy that Anthony’s a good guy, and he’s so charismatic that you can forget, for long stretches of the season, how little else there is to define him. But even as the rest of the ensemble’s subplots become increasingly complex—and their high jinks increasingly overwrought—he remains a blank slate. Eventually, it becomes impossible not to wonder how he came to Rockin’ Grandma’s in the first place, and where he hopes to go from here. He’s a young dad, a transplant from Tennessee who’s been working odd jobs for years. Are the lengths to which he’ll go to ignore the weirdness of his new gig and make a positive impression all about being “good,” or is this a desperate audition for full-time employment that will never come? The show, with its interest in corporate buffoonery, doesn’t quite manage to hand-wave away the queasy implications. The harder it pushes for a black-and-white vision of morality, the more shades of gray appear. ♦