The creators of “Jury Duty” performed nothing short of a miracle when a few short years ago, they successfully pitched and produced a reality-comedy hoax series that featured virtually zero marketable qualities — no guaranteed longevity, no IP-driven content, no low-budget structure. In fact, the project, whose premise depended on sustaining a false reality for one unknowing star, inherently risked self-destruction.
“It’s one of the only television shows that has ever been greenlit, that there’s a very real prospect of it actually not reaching the end,” co-creator Lee Eisenberg said.
Eisenberg and his team breathed a massive sigh of relief when Ronald Gladden, the everyman at the center of “Jury Duty,” made it to the courtroom mockumentary’s scripted final reveal: There was no trial, all of his fellow “jurors” were actually actors and the documentary Gladden believed was being filmed about the judicial process was actually a “Truman Show”-style TV experiment. (Don’t worry, Gladden’s $100,000 cash prize cushioned the blow of James Marsden’s betrayal.)
Then they struck lightning again.
“Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat,” premiering Friday with three episodes, takes the original show’s staged reality premise to a new setting: a family-owned hot sauce company’s annual retreat. Following an unwitting temp worker as he attempts to hold this splintering small business together, the new installment offers all the belly laughs of “Jury Duty” — Eisenberg and his co-creator Gene Stupnitsky’s writing credits on a pair of cult-favorite “The Office” episodes, “Dinner Party” and “Scott’s Tots,” help explain the top-tier comedy — but ups the ante with a set 10 times the size of its predecessor, a shuttered courthouse, and an ensemble cast charged with playing convincing longtime co-workers.
“We really wanted it to feel more cinematic, and then alongside that, we had to create so many backstories,” Eisenberg said. “People had to know each other’s histories. They needed to know who got promoted instead of this person, and what someone does on the weekends, whereas in ‘Jury Duty,’ you’re meeting a bunch of strangers. So it was a different type of lift.”
With so much left to chance and improvisation, “every day, it could fall apart,” Eisenberg said.
But that’s also why it’s exciting for producer Todd Schulman, who said that after working on these highly improvised shows, “It feels like cheating if both actors know what they’re gonna say in a scene.”
Below, Eisenberg and Schulman answer some of the biggest questions surrounding “Company Retreat.”
Why is this season not ‘Jury Duty’ as we remember it?
The obvious answer to this question would be that, were the “Jury Duty” creators to repeat the courtroom premise, their “hero” would be far more likely to clock the ruse. But Schulman said inventing a new scenario wasn’t so much about protecting their gambit as it was about inventing something new — and raising the stakes.
“We just felt like creatively, we had explored that terrain already,” Schulman said. “It was more exciting, the idea of taking this same kind of conceit of a real person in a sitcom-like environment, and putting it in other worlds.”
Who is the ‘hero,’ the person who is not in on the ruse?
Those who were charmed by Gladden in “Jury Duty” are sure to fall for the hero of “Company Retreat,” Anthony Norman of Nashville.
Norman, who was 25 years old during filming, was one of 10,000 people who applied to what they believed was a documentary project about a small business. Choosing a hero from a sample that large is “truly an art, not a science,” Schulman said, but Norman, like Gladden, possessed an “incredible decency and humanity that really makes you just root for them.”
“You could just tell there was a warmth to him and a real comfort in his own shoes,” Schulman said. “He knew who he was, and he wasn’t going to be rattled or thrown off his game in any way by the stuff we were going to put him through.”
Eisenberg and Schulman agreed that sharing too much about Norman before people could watch the show would spoil all the delightful surprises he delivers. But Eisenberg did say that his loyalty to Rockin’ Grandma’s and its employees was astonishing: “You can’t script anything like that.”
How did they land on a company retreat as the new premise?
Early into talks of a second season, Eisenberg said producers and writers were kicking around a number of ideas that offered an environment akin to a sequestered jury trial, plus potential for storybook drama. The one idea that kept bubbling up, he said, was a corporate retreat.
“Creatively, we really liked this idea of David versus Goliath,” the producer said. “We kept talking about these tropes from ‘80s movies of slobs versus snobs,” and how it mirrored the mom-and-pop shop versus big business dynamic.
At the same time, the “Company Retreat” team wanted the show to feel “like it existed within the ‘Jury Duty’ world,” but they also “wanted it to feel like its own thing,” Eisenberg said.
Why use a hot sauce company in the show?
Eisenberg said that the production team always wanted to focus on a consumer-facing brand, ideally a family-owned one, to develop that “David versus Goliath” narrative that grounds the show.
Plus, the writers loved the phenomenon of hot sauce companies having such absurd names — think “Slap Ya Mama.”
How was Norman different from Gladden as a hero?
Norman was tasked with far more responsibility than Gladden had been, Eisenberg added, and yet he rose to every challenge they primed him for. At times, he beat the narrative to the jump, making decisions the producers anticipated would come far later than they did.
“Does he have a script that I’m not seeing?” Eisenberg recalled thinking on set.
Additionally, although he declined to specify how, Schulman said that they took measures to ensure Norman had never seen “Jury Duty.”
“We just lucked out,” he said about the budding star.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.latimes.com ’
