Jury Duty’s candid camera prank on Ronald Gladden was, at heart, a celebration of our better selves. But what it displayed in empathy, it occasionally lacked in hard-hitting humor.
Not so with Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat, a follow-up (March 20, Prime Video) that greatly expands the scope—and hilarity—of its predecessor by staging a long-form hoax on an unsuspecting “hero” who’s hired to be a temporary assistant at a company’s annual retreat.
In every respect, it’s a more ambitious, amusing, and ultimately moving practical-joke portrait of goodness.
The mark in Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat is Anthony Norman, a 25-year-old Nashville native who successfully applies to be a temp at Canoga Park, California’s Rockin’ Grandma’s Hot Sauce, a family enterprise run by CEO/founder Doug Womack (Jerry Hauck).
Anthony believes this is a real gig, but it’s not. Everyone involved is an actor working for creators (and former writers for The Office) Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, showrunner Cody Heller, and director Jake Szymanski. Only Anthony is unaware of what’s going on. And at least when he first arrives at work, he has no reason to suspect anything, since the colleagues he meets, including HR boss Kevin (Ryan Perez), are no kookier than the average co-worker.
While the express purpose of this ruse is never articulated, Company Retreat’s sweet approach to its gambit—which, with a few tweaks, might play out meanly—underscores its interest in gauging its everyman’s response to increasingly weird situations.
After meeting a few of his new office mates, Anthony travels with everyone to Oak Canyon Ranch for a week of fun, games, and team-building exercises. It’s also, he learns, going to be a passing-the-torch event, as Doug is set to hand over control of the company to his son Dougie (Alex Bonifer), a buffoon who’s recently returned from an extended residence in Jamaica where he flamed out with his ska-via-EDM band The Jive Prophets.
In a show filled with appealing figures, Bonifer’s Dougie—a lovable nepo baby who doesn’t want to be thought of as just “the Bronnie of hot sauce”—is the standout, and his habit of breaking into a Jamaican accent (much to the chagrin of LaNisa Renee Frederick’s distribution chief Jackie) is the single funniest element in either season of Jury Duty.
That said, Company Retreat is an across-the-board improvement on its precursor. Taking place in and around the expansive Oak Canyon Ranch, the series’ scale has been significantly enlarged, affording far more opportunities for unexpected chaos. Better still, rather than strangers meeting for jury duty, the show’s fictional characters have known each other for years, thereby creating a sense of camaraderie and community that adds depth to their dynamics and swiftly proves central to Anthony’s unique experience.
Company Retreat benefits from its sounder conceit. The show can get away with crazier antics than Jury Duty because Anthony’s tolerance for lunacy at a company retreat (before suspecting that something fishy is going on) is naturally greater than Ronald’s was in his formal courthouse setting. This means the sequel can push things in ways its ancestor could not, and it starts doing so as soon as the crew reaches the rustic getaway, courtesy of a Kevin blunder that forces Anthony to assume the mantle of “Captain Fun” and help spearhead the ensuing activities.
There are more laugh-out-loud incidents in the first few episodes of Company Retreat than in the entirety of Jury Duty, all of them due to a cast with naturally goofy chemistry. Whether it’s wannabe snack-fluencer PJ (Marc-Sully Saint-Fleur), socially awkward web designer Claire (Rachel Kaly), or warehouse manager Jimmy (Jim A. Woods)—the last of whom is a reformed boor who can’t stop being a performative politically correct ally—the series is full of colorful personalities whose tangled relationships are a source of amiable silliness.
They’re also a quite endearing bunch whose compassion for each other and acceptance of Anthony are wholly reciprocated, with the newbie embracing them as his family and fighting for their rights in the face of unexpected threats.
The biggest of those comes in the form of Elizabeth Prescott (Wendy Braun), an investor with private equity firm Triukas, to whom Doug—in the aftermath of a colossal Dougie screw-up—decides to sell Rockin’ Grandma’s Hot Sauce.
Few support this potential development, least of all Anthony, and at every turn, Company Retreat creates highly charged scenarios that test its protagonist’s altruism, benevolence, and loyalty. What it repeatedly discovers is that Anthony is about the nicest person alive, ready at a moment’s notice to do the right thing for others, to stand up for his admirable values, and to put his brand new colleagues’ welfare ahead of his own.
Company Retreat is an eight-episode gag that’s nominally at Anthony’s expense. And yet, eventually, it becomes a tribute to his excellence as an employee, a friend, and a person. A team player who isn’t afraid to take charge, always operates with the company’s best interests in mind, and is charming, hard-working, and ego-free, he’s almost too good to be true.
His knack for making the correct decision in times of stress, panic, and potential catastrophe—be it via an encouraging word or a race-against-the-clock act of valor—turns him into an eminently appealing center of attention.
Tensions between small-business and corporate cultures are omnipresent in Company Retreat, and yet the mood remains jovial throughout. By its midway point, the question isn’t whether Anthony is going to balk at a given bit of insanity but, rather, how much of a role he’s going to assume in the outcome of this story, whose action is a mixture of scripted set-ups and improvised interactions—a combination that’s elevated, in this case, by believable and likable performances.
Less an exercise in gauging Anthony’s capacity to endure foolishness than an examination of his inherent character, Company Retreat evolves the series’ formula to superior results. In the final tally, that’s most true with regards to Anthony, who by the conclusion of this odyssey comes out looking so fantastic that the show serves as perhaps the most persuasive “hire me!” advertisement in TV history.
