How do you film a TV show when your main character doesn’t know he’s on it? You make sure to cast the right person.
“One of the joys of working on The Office was it was all discovery,” Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat co-creator Lee Eisenberg told Obsessed: The Podcast. “And when you cast the right people, they surprise you every day.”
Before co-creating Jury Duty alongside former SNL director Jake Szymanski, Eisenberg directed The Office, under the guidance of his mentor, Greg Daniels.
“The thing about The Office was, as much as possible, it felt small and real and relatable,” Eisenberg, 48, added. “All the comedy came from character. And so when we set out to do Jury Duty, it was the same thing."
Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat, the much-anticipated sequel to 2023’s most elaborate prank show, surrounds an unwitting new hire, Anthony Norman, with a cast of in-the-know actors posing as employees at the fictitious Rockin’ Grandma’s Hot Sauce during its annual company retreat.
Much like The Office‘s fan-favorite “Beach Games” episode from Season 3, wherein Dunder Mifflin employees embark on an out-of-office field trip, Jury Duty‘s creators sequestered its cast via a corporate retreat to the Southern California hills.
“This is the only scripted show on TV that has no cuts, so the actors have a tremendous responsibility,” Eisenberg said. “There’s just an inherent danger to it, so you really are putting so much faith in the performances.”
It might surprise fans, however, to know that the show is heavily scripted, sometimes written years in advance.
“You’re rewriting, you’re rewriting, you’re rewriting, and then on the day you’re like, ‘Well, f---. That’s not the way we thought it was gonna go,’” he added. “You don’t have the luxury of calling ‘Cut!’ ever.”
The challenge for Jury Duty producers, some of whom previously worked with prankster Sacha Baron Cohen, is to maintain a balance between larger-than-life comedic moments and mundane, everyday office work, with the intent of keeping Anthony in the dark.
“You’re writing the show and the episodes that you see on TV. And then you’re writing and creating everything else in real-time that Anthony is going to live for those weeks that he’s with us,” Syzmanski, 44, said. “And most of that’s not in the show, but it still all has to be planned.”
Whereas Season 1 was built around a group of supposed strangers assigned to a jury, Season 2 is built around a group of co-workers who have known each other for years.
“In Season 2, the family already exists. So the challenge was these people need to have inside jokes,” Eisenberg said. “At the core of it, we love the size of the company. It felt very much spiritually related to a Dunder Mifflin.”
But the show’s fulcrum is Anthony, who was chosen to navigate Jury Duty‘s comedic storm because of his “heart.”
“Right now, the world is a bit of a dumpster fire, and everywhere you turn are lies, misinformation, and cynicism,” Eisenberg said. “And all of a sudden, you have something where at the center of it is a hero. And that’s something very intentional from the beginning... It’s about seeing the best of humanity.”
Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat is streaming on Amazon Prime Video with the final three episodes dropping on Friday, Apr. 3. James Marsden, the celebrity star of the show’s first season, will host a reunion special with the “heroes” of both seasons on Apr. 10.
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