[imagesource:amazonfreevee]

The best and most surprising part of Amazon Prime Video Freevee’s new mockumentary-style series from the makers of The Office is that it created a fledgling TV star out of an average dude from nowhere.

Sorry, the show’s twist is already well-known.

Jury Duty follows a group of jurors – including Westworld‘s very own James Marsden – as they take part in a trial in California.

The key plot point is that 30-year-old Ronald Gladden has no idea he is in an elaborate The Truman Show-esque situation where all of the actors are improvising around his responses to the increasingly bizarre trial instead of being in a documentary about the judicial system. Vulture explains more:

Throughout the experiment, the goal was to follow Gladden’s reactions to crazy situations — like when a juror played by comedian Mekki Leeper tries to get out of court by saying he’s racist, or when a rude James Marsden, played by James Marsden, gets stuck in jury duty alongside everyone else and isn’t happy about it — instead of making him the butt of the joke.

The results of this grand duping are priceless.

And Gladden got to walk away $100 000 richer. He was all the wiser in the end, too, after a tour of how the whole experiment was orchestrated by the producers of Bad Trip and The Office.

Looks like fun:

Gladden has become a star of his own since the series debut, having earned a substantial following on TikTok, where he’s been dubbed “the perfect example of the female gaze”:

@deanpamaypay ronald playing a bug’s life for todd is definitely top ten sweetest moments on tv #juryduty #jurydutyonfreevee #tvshow ♬ original sound – Dean

Aw, Ronald needs to be added to the list of grown male actors being called babygirl all over the internet.

In the end, there were still more questions to be answered, so series co-creator Lee Eisenberg and executive producer Todd Schulman spoke about how they chose Gladden to lead the series, and how they orchestrated the jury trial of a lifetime:

What made Ronald the perfect “hero”? How many people did you consider before choosing him?
Lee Eisenberg: One of the things we talked about from the beginning was we wanted a show that never felt like it was punching down and felt optimistic, that had the tropes and the tone of something like The Office but really had a warmth and an optimism to it as well. When we saw Ronald’s tape, we couldn’t believe it. He’s such a nice guy. He’s funny, he’s charming, he’s witty. That’s what we had hoped for. He exceeded our expectations in every single moment of the show.

In the scene where Ronald showed Todd the movie A Bug’s Life because he thought Todd could relate to it, Eisenberg said he wished he could “come up with a moment like that” but that it was just Ronald being a genuinely nice guy, while Schulman added:

“I think that scene embodies what I love about this genre or format — whatever we want to call it. As a viewer, it just restores your hope and humanity a little bit. There are good people out there who are really trying not to mock misfits, and if someone’s a little different, not to make fun of them, but actually trying to show them there’s a place for them. That is so heartwarming.”

Jury Duty is available to watch on Amazon Prime Video, even if you don’t have a subscription to the platform’s ‘Freevee’ service.

The first four episodes have already been released, with two more to land on the platform on April 14.

[source:vulture]