On the night of April 6, the creators of “Jury Duty,” a
hybrid documentary-sitcom in which an ordinary man unwittingly participates in
a staged trial among actors, came together in Culver City, California, for a
cast and crew screening of the series.
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The atmosphere was muted. Early reviews had been
unflattering — The Hollywood Reporter, earlier that day, had called it “a bad
show for benign reasons”. And with it premiering the next day on Amazon
Freevee, an ad-supported streaming platform few were familiar with,
expectations for the show’s success were modest, if not outright low.
“The vibe at the screening I would describe as very much
like, ‘We made a show, we should be proud of that,’” Todd Schulman, an
executive producer, said in a recent video interview. “I believed in what we
had made. But there is so much content out there, and this is on a platform
that’s not as well-known as the other ones, so let’s be realistic about what’s
going to happen.”
“Then the next three weeks unfolded,” he continued. “And it
felt insane.”
After a slow start, “Jury Duty” rapidly found an audience,
building ecstatic word-of-mouth buzz to become a bona fide social media
sensation, with clips of the show racking up hundreds of millions of views on
TikTok.
Broader interest in the show spiked accordingly, more than
doubling in the month after premiere, according to research by Parrot
Analytics. (The company assesses the popularity of shows by analyzing audience
demand — a combination of streaming, social media, search and other online
behaviors.) Interest in “Jury Duty” remains higher now than it was during the
show’s initial run, in April, suggesting that plenty of viewers are still
discovering it, Parrot said.
Like most streamers, Amazon declines to give viewing
numbers, but it confirmed that “Jury Duty” has been Freevee’s most watched show
since it premiered. Last week, seeking to capitalize and build on the
popularity, Amazon released a line of “Jury Duty” merchandise as well as new
versions of the episodes that include cast commentary.
All of which has prompted a lot of people to ask the same
question: How did this happen?“Jury Duty” feels like a minor miracle. The premise is
fraught with peril: The nominal star, a contractor named Ronald Gladden, has no
idea that he is in a sitcom — he had been told that some parts of the trial
were being recorded as a documentary — and one of the thrilling things about
watching is the constant sense that at any moment it could all implode. Gladden
could have discovered the ruse; the actors playing the other jurors could have
broken character or flubbed lines. But all involved managed to pull it off.
Schulman and his team were not even sure that they could.
When they were pitching the concept around Hollywood, they received little
interest, with most networks passing on the grounds that it posed too much of a
creative risk. It was ultimately Freevee and its head of originals, Lauren
Anderson, who was eager to take that chance.
“Usually when you say ‘They took a chance on us,’ it means
they took a chance because the show could have been bad,” Schulman said. “But
they could give us millions of dollars and not get a show — that’s a different
scale of chance-taking.”
In an interview, Anderson said that when she first heard the
pitch, at the start of the pandemic, Freevee — which was known at the time as
IMDb TV — had not released any original content and was looking for “noisy,
buzzy and unique” programming to set its slate apart. “I got the feeling that
this could be really special,” she said.
James Marsden was less confident. The star of “Westworld”
and “Sonic the Hedgehog” has a recurring role in “Jury Duty,” playing an
exaggeratedly arrogant, pretentious version of himself who is ordered to be a
backup juror for the trial. While Marsden was initially intrigued by the idea,
he said in a phone interview that his doubts set in once the production began.
“I started thinking, Oh my God, what have I gotten myself
into? Can we even do this? Can we pull this off?” he said. Even if it worked,
he did not think it would land: “I thought this would either be the end of my
career or something that maybe a handful of people would see.”
Even Gladden did not expect much to come from it once the
production had wrapped. (That he was on a TV show was revealed to him in the
final episode, but he had to wait months for it to make it to air.)
“It was on a brand-new streaming platform that no one had
ever heard of, so I didn’t really think it was going to go anywhere,” Gladden
said over the phone from Los Angeles. “I truthfully didn’t think anything was
going to come from it”.
Leading up to the premiere, the buzz was virtually
nonexistent, but there were signs the show could resonate. A trailer put out by
Freevee did not cause much of a splash, but then one of the show’s writers,
Kerry O’Neill, shared the trailer to her Twitter account with the caption, “We
truman showed a man,” and the tweet blew up. The idea that someone had
re-created “The Truman Show,” the Jim Carrey movie about a man unknowingly
living life on TV, “really contextualized everything for people,” said Nicholas
Hatton, one of the show’s executive producers. The trailer embedded in
O’Neill’s tweet received 1.3 million views.
While middling reviews dampened expectations, show clips put
out by Freevee found an immediate foothold on TikTok. “I’m a 44-year-old man;
I’m not on TikTok,” Schulman said dryly. “I couldn’t believe how many people my
age or older were telling me that they heard about the show from their teenage
kids. It was working its way generationally upward.”
The fan TikTok videos — which Freevee had no part in
creating, though it also posted clips to its own TikTok account — were like
short, self-contained advertisements for the series. Users shared scenes out of
context with a line or two of explanation, and it proved more than enough for people
to understand the conceit and get hyped.
Essential to the show’s appeal, especially on TikTok, has
been Gladden’s warmth and positivity as the unwitting lead. Faced over and over
again with oblique ethical quandaries engineered by the writers (such as
whether to take the blame for an embarrassing bathroom accident caused by
Marsden) and forced to endure the bizarre behavior of his fellow “jurors,”
Gladden exuded an unflappable sweetness that viewers have found touching and
inspiring.
Not surprisingly, the more than 200,000 Instagram followers
he now has have been flooding Gladden’s inbox with positive messages. “People
have been telling me things like, ‘You’ve inspired me to be a better person,’
or ‘you make me want to be nicer to people,’” he said. “It’s the best reaction
I could have gotten.”
Every network hopes to cultivate this kind of grassroots
furor, and modern streaming content can feel as if it is actively courting
viral success (consider the “Wednesday” dance). But no one involved with “Jury Duty”
intended for it to be a TikTok hit.
“This show took off in a way that you can’t buy,” Anderson
said. “It took on a life of its own, in the way that you want to happen for
every show you make but which you just can’t predict.”
That it was a happy accident hasn’t stopped others in the
industry from lusting after the recipe, of course. “I’ve had people who work at
other platforms call me and say, ‘OK, what’s the secret? What did Freevee do to
make this go viral?’” Schulman said. “It was completely organic.”
As for what it was about “Jury Duty” in particular that
resonated with audiences on TikTok, Marsden has a theory. “Young people go onto
YouTube or their explore feed on TikTok or Instagram, and they watch people
slipping on the ice or doing a silly dance,” he said. “They want to see what’s
going on out there in all its absurdity or its hilariousness or its scariness. They
want to watch something real, and not fake.”
The centerpiece of “Jury Duty” is a real guy, and that edge
of reality, Marsden feels, is what captures the imagination of the young.
“Every 20-year-old can see themselves in that position and think, ‘What if that
was me?’ There’s something kind of dangerous and exciting about that.”
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