![]() But here, Jury Duty employs a smart shift in narrative. ![]() It’s all the more nerve-racking, then, when you reach the final episode and realize that Gladden is in for a big shock. He handles these moments with grace and (spoiler alert) manages to wrangle the jurors into delivering a fair and balanced verdict in the end. ![]() The joy of watching Jury Duty is waiting to see how Gladden will react when, say, a cabinet appears to fall on one of the jurors, or when he has to beat Marsden at arm wrestling so that the actor will pay the jury’s absurdly expensive Margaritaville bill. He sees some of Todd in the character of Flik, an ant whose inventions aren’t always taken seriously by those around him, and wants him to know, he earnestly tells the cameras, “that those people tend to be misunderstood in society.” Bernad remembers watching footage come through and thinking, “Holy shit, this is working in a way that maybe we didn’t anticipate.” ![]() In another scene, Gladden tries to bond with David Brown’s Todd-an outsider who shows up to jury duty wearing “chair pants” that allow him to sit down anywhere-by showing him the animated movie A Bug’s Life. But long before the start of jury selection, after being asked what people usually do to get dismissed, Gladden himself suggests to Noah that he take inspiration from an episode of Family Guy and use racism to get sent home. In the first episode, for instance, it was scripted that Mekki Leeper’s Noah-a dorky innocent worried about his relationship with his girlfriend-would pretend he was racist to get out of serving on the jury. What they couldn’t know when casting Gladden was just how perfect for the part he’d be. “He’s always being put in positions to be heroic.” “It’s not mean-spirited Ronald is never a target,” Bernad adds. Sampietro, a veteran of Sacha Baron Cohen projects like Who Is America?, was looking for someone who would be the good guy in everyday life. “Alexis really went to bat for Ronald,” he says. Bernad credits producer Alexis Sampietro with sorting through some 8,000 applications to find Gladden. But doing so depended on finding the right unsuspecting person. The goal was always to create a hero’s journey for the unsuspecting person thrown into the chaotic world of Jury Duty. “What I heard was something that was ambitious and funny and special, but also coming from producers who are just incredibly responsible-knowing that they would make a show that was heartwarming and fun and lovely and playful and unexpected, but responsible.” “I heard the pitch, and I just immediately said, ‘It’s gonna be great,’” she says with a laugh. Pick the wrong everyman, or cast a group of actors who aren’t able to adapt as the story requires, and the whole thing implodes. Jury Duty is the kind of show that could have gone wildly off the rails. What the solar contractor didn’t know was that the other jurors, the judge, the lawyers, and even the diners at the local Margaritaville were all in on the joke. Gladden found his way onto the show after responding to a Craigslist ad for a project about the judicial process. I was like, Oh, there might be an audience for this show.”Ĭreated as a Truman Show for the TikTok era, Jury Duty employs docuseries-style camerawork to tell the story of a civil court case that gets a little out of hand. “It was funny because people at the dinner would be watching like, What the fuck is this? People were so engaged in it. “I’d be at dinners with the cast or whomever, and I’d be watching while eating,” he says. He got it while breaking bread with the White Lotus cast, when he’d be watching the footage roll in as normie Ronald Gladden got selected for the jury and then asked to sequester for at least a week thanks to a paparazzi stunt pulled by James Marsden, playing a self-centered version of himself. But back in Italy, Bernad was looking for a sign that the wildly ambitious gambit was working. Since Jury Duty premiered last month, it’s become a meme-worthy breakout for Freevee. But he found himself immersed in drama unfolding thousands of miles away, on the set of another of his shows.įrom his phone, Bernad could watch the live feed of Jury Duty, the Amazon Freevee comedy about an unsuspecting everyman who gets asked to serve on a jury where everyone is an actor-except him. David Bernad was living the good life, enjoying some sun and satire while executive producing the second season of The White Lotus in Sicily.
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