Title: Jury Duty
Rating: 5 Stars
An ad is placed on Craigslist. A documentary crew wants to follow someone around while they’re performing jury duty. The purpose is to get an inside look at the actual details of performing your civic duty. A number of people apply. Only one, a solar contractor named Ronald Gladden, is selected. The trial that Gladden participates in is a civil trial where an employee is accused of causing extensive damage to his employer’s business while high on drugs or alcohol.
We see Gladden go through the entire process. We see him fill out his juror questionnaire. We see him go through voir dire. We see him get selected for a jury. We see him get picked to be the jury foreperson. We see the opening statements, the evidence presented, and the closing statements. We watch as he leads his fellow jurors in deliberation. Once they come to a consensus, he reads the verdict in the courtroom.
Along the way, Gladden sees some weird shit. First of all, at best B list actor James Marsden (known for roles in the X-Men series of films as well as The Notebook), is a jury alternate and it turns out, kind of an asshole. We meet his fellow jurors, including the techno nerd Todd, the slow talking but very earnest Ken, the virginally innocent Noah who discovers that his girlfriend is cheating on him during the trial, and the vixen Jeannie, who leaps at the chance to seduce the now disconsolate Noah. Gladden sees Marsden hire paparazzi to invade the courtroom in a bid to get out of jury duty but instead results in the jury getting sequestered over the course of the trial, which lasts for an astounding seventeen days. Gladden also sees some comically incompetent lawyering on behalf of the defendant.
What Gladden doesn’t know (but we know) is that it’s all a sham. There is no jury. There is no trial. They are all actors. The judge is an actor. His fellow jurors are actors. Both the plaintiff and the defendant and their lawyers are actors. Gladden is the only person not in on the joke.
In the final episode, when Gladden is told, all of the layers are exposed that made this deception possible. There is basically a control room devoted to watching Gladden (in case you haven’t already, you now get the Truman Show reference in the blog title). There are hidden cameras everywhere. On the dinner out, the entire Margaritaville restaurant was closed and taken over for the show. Similarly, at one point the Huntington Beach District Court was shut down, ostensibly for COVID reasons, to prepare for the show.
The main thing that comes out of it is the sweet nature of Gladden. No matter what happens, he treats everyone graciously and respectfully. Even when told that the trial is a sham, he just looks astounded and laughs. Of course, the $100,000 that he’s given for being the ‘hero’ of the show probably helped mitigate whatever feelings of betrayal he might have had.
The execution of this astounds me. For seventeen days, an entire rehearsed show was performed. For seventeen days, no one could break character. If Gladden figured it out on day fifteen, all would have been lost. Behind the scenes, you see that the producers have entire flow charts of possibilities that they might have to execute, depending upon the choices that Gladden makes. There’s a whole scene where Noah claims to be a racist in a very misguided attempt to get out of jury duty. This could only work if Gladden remembered and mentioned an old South Park episode. There was a factory visit (the so-called scene of the incident) where it was important for the later jury deliberation that Gladden go upstairs to an office. They had to contrive a seemingly natural way for him to choose to go up. They were seemingly prepared for nearly every contingency.
In many ways, this reminded me of the very strange yet very funny Nathan Fielder series, The Rehearsal (I wrote about it here). Like The Rehearsal, it exists in this strange nexus of reality television and scripted drama. As you get deeper into the series, you begin to wonder what really is real and what is scripted. Did Gladden really have no inkling what is going on? Is he really in on it and the joke is on us? When everyone is involved in the deception, who can we trust?
James Marsden is outstanding. He perfectly plays the spoiled, self centered, fragile actor. Not only does his antics cause the jury to be sequestered, but when he clogs Gladden’s toilet after taking a massive dump in it, he coerces Gladden to accept the blame for it because otherwise TMZ might hear about it and report this Marsden toilet clogging scandal. Marsden reminds me of Nicholas Cage in The Unbearable Weight of Immense Talent (written about here). It must be challenging to play a subtly different version of yourself. In Marsden’s case, he needed to do it for seventeen days without breaking.
Now having watched it, I now wonder if Gladden is going to spend the rest of his life experiencing Main Character Syndrome. For seventeen days, unknowingly, he was the lead in a fictional story of his life.
dorkenstein 