Jury Duty has managed to deceive two unsuspecting do-gooders with civic duty and a company retreat.
Amazon renewed the series for a third season shortly after it revealed to temp worker Anthony Norman that Rockin’ Grandma’s Hot Sauce was not a real company in Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat.
This has led to fans of the show to ruminate on how the team will set up another elaborate prank.
Many have shipped the idea of the show being set on the open waters.
“We were talking about a cruise ship,” Wendy Braun, who played Elizabeth Prescott, the head of Triukas, the private equity company that was supposedly trying to buy Rockin’ Grandma’s Hot Sauce, told TV Insider. “Every year gets sort of a bigger scale. … There’s so much more space to cover. It’s not in one room, it’s a whole campus, and so you’re gonna have to go bigger.”
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However, executive producer Anthony King has lowered the sails on that idea.
“The one that I get pitched all the time is cruise ship. So many people pick cruise ships, which I get, you’re in a space, but I feel like so much of the magic of the first two seasons are that the premise is so mundane, like jury duty and a company retreat. You’re not like, ‘Yay!’. To find the heart and the humanity and the connection between these characters in that mundane setting, to me, is part of what makes it challenging, but also rewarding.”
The first two leads were male. Some have said that a woman might figure out what’s going on faster than a Ronald Gladden or Anthony Norman. King said, “I talked to my wife about that. She goes, ‘I would Google every single person immediately. I would find everything they’ve ever done.’”
King was speaking at the Writers’ Guild Foundation’s event alongside a number of other writers, who were all nominated for an Emmy in the Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series category. Jury Duty is up against Abbott Elementary, The Chair Company, The Comeback, Hack and Widow’s Bay.
King revealed that the writers’ room on the show is “surprisingly similar” to other scripted shows; King also exec produces series including HBO’s Rooster.
“I thought it was going to be one of the whole choose-your-own picture books. But when you think that through for production, that would be impossible,” he added. “Instead, it’s more about we’re creating character arcs, we’re building out the story of the season. We just have a character who we know we cannot predict how they will react in every scene, but we can try to game plan if how they might react and how we might counter that.”
There were some crazy plotlines in season two including a failed marriage proposal and an appearance from pop star Sia. But there was also a lot of stuff that was filmed that was never shown. This included a fake product placement for the sauce in an episode of Bosch and one of the actors throwing out the first pitch at a minor league baseball game.
