Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat premieres March 20 on Prime Video.
By Elazar Abrahams
The original Jury Duty, which premiered in 2023 on Amazon’s no longer existent FreeVee service, was lightning in a bottle. Not just the logistics of creating a Truman Show-like escapade where everything was a fake TV show except for one person living through it, but that that person happened to be the most likeable do-gooder possible. Yes, Jury Duty’s Ronald Gladden was a crucial ingredient to the mix. So with any follow-up, it’d seem tough to pull this off again.
Yet some way, somehow, Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat has found another guy with a heart of gold. Anthony Norman, aged 25 at the time of filming, will restore your faith in humanity a bit. This second season of shenanigans drops him into the office of Rockin’ Grandma’s Hot Sauce, a fake company with fake employees, each ratcheting up the ridiculousness to our delight, as Anthony, unaware of the “prank,” befriends them all and solves their problems.
In the first iteration of this concept, everyone was a juror meeting for the first time, so the awkwardness was built into the premise. Here, this improv troupe is meant to have history. They have inside jokes, resentments, alliances, weird workplace dynamics, and the actors have to sell all of that without ever cracking. Because this is an established group, the comedy often comes from characters hiding secrets from one another while accidentally or intentionally sharing them with Anthony, who is then forced to carry these little time bombs around the retreat like he’s HR and a therapist rolled into one.
Two standouts are Marge, the worker on the retreat grounds, and Dougie Jr., the boss’s son who is the heir to the CEO throne, somehow making every situation worse. And with Dougie, the writers have a great gag to always fall back on: a white man doing a Jamaican accent will always be hilarious.
The season doesn’t overstay its welcome. It’s paced well, finding news to up the ante throughout but revealing the ruse to our protagonist at just the right moment. Jury Duty set a very high bar, and while this new installment may have less laugh out loud moments, it is a very worthy successor.
I give Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat an A-.
TV and City 