Jury Duty is an 8-episode mockumentary series on Amazon Prime that I had no idea about until just recently.

On the YouTube program For Your Consideration, one of the hosts, Jeff Sneider, mentioned Jury Duty as they were discussing potential Emmy nominations, Sneider had said very few had watched the show but everyone that did were raving over it.

Then, there were literally four Emmy nominations for the show including Outstanding Comedy Series, Supporting Actor (James Marsden), Casting and Writing.

Finally, I saw a Thread from Kristian Harloff talking about how he had been recommended the series by Roxy Striar and that he found it incredibly funny. That made me even more intrigued and I became interested in seeing exactly what this show was about.

It was hilarious!

It was filmed in documentary style. The show was going to look at the process of the American Justice System through the eyes of a jury. The only thing was that everyone involved was an actor… except for one person.

One juror was a real person, who thought he was involved in a real documentary, but was actually being filmed for this TV show.

His name was Ronald Gladden and, unbeknownst to him, he had just become the star of this TV program. James Marsden played a fictionalized version of himself and acted like he was just an obnoxious Hollywood star. The rest of the jury pool was filled out with actors who had bizarre characters that you would think would tip Ronald off that something weird was going on.

And it did. He felt like real life was just out there.

He said that he felt like he was in a reality show a couple of times, which was really funny considering he sort of was. He took every bizarre circumstance so well and with such patience that you had to love this person.

The cast and crew had everything planned out and scripted, but there was an air of improvisation too since you were never sure what Ronald would do or how he may react to the oddness around him. If he would have done one thing, it would have affected what they had planned. It was also impressive that the cast did not crack up during the filming and that they did such an outstanding job of staying in character.

About into episode five or six, I was really hoping to see the reaction of Ronald when it was revealed that this whole trial and sequestering of the jury was scripted. Thankfully, the final episode of the season was a reveal episode, showing Ronald the truth, showed him how things were done and who these people that he had gotten to know over the previous three weeks, actually were.

The “casting” of Ronald was a huge success for this show as if he was not such an awesome and sweet guy, this show would have broken him. Instead, he stepped up in a situation that he thought was real, but was insane and handled everything beautifully.

Jury Duty absolutely deserved the Emmy nominations that it received and I am happy that I was able to watch the series. Jury Duty featured eight episodes that were about a half hour long making this an easy binge watch.