Jury Duty review: Ronald Gladden stars in real life Truman Show

Ronald Gladden, left, and James Marsden star in Jury Duty.

Married reviewers Greg Bruce and Zanna Gillespie are simultaneously moved and ethically challenged by the exploitation of Ronald Gladden.

SHE SAW

We spent the first episode questioning whether to believe the premise or not; the next few oscillating between laughter and a desire to give up on the show altogether; and the last episode blubbering like little babies as our hearts filled with the beauty of human connection. It’s not uncommon for a film or television series to open with a bang, build intrigue, emotion and excitement consistently throughout and then stumble at the final hurdle and fail to deliver a satisfying ending, but it is uncommon to do the opposite. Jury Duty had a bumpy takeoff followed by a turbulent flight, but the most beautiful landing imaginable.

The series is essentially a court-based Truman Show. A fake case and a fake courtroom filled with actors playing every role from defendant, plaintiff, judge and bailiff to the 12 other jurors (well, 11 and one alternate played by James Marsden) was set up around one unsuspecting person, juror #6, Ronald Gladden, who was told the cameras were there to make a documentary about the trial. It’s an incredible prank to pull off, not least because they managed to keep Gladden fooled for a full three weeks while the most outrageous things happened around him.

Tasked with being the jury’s foreperson, Gladden was ordered to keep this cast of weirdos in line. An elderly juror kept falling asleep, a young nerd couldn’t stop worrying about his girlfriend’s suspected infidelity, a quirky amateur inventor brought the strangest contraptions into the courtroom and Marsden wouldn’t stop harping on about a top-secret film project he was preparing for. The defence attorney was a technologically inept mess but the judge and bailiff were flawless and probably what kept Gladden from uncovering the facade throughout.

It must have been a detailed, difficult process to cast Gladden but the creators never could’ve predicted what a sweet, life-affirming show he would help them make. At every opportunity, this man proves himself to be a genuinely good guy: he’s warm, inclusive, non-judgmental and always does the right thing. I felt uneasy about the show exploiting him, it’s undoubtedly unethical and the reveal moment was uncomfortable and sad. He believed he knew these other jurors intimately, that they’d formed lifelong bonds, only to learn they were all in on something he wasn’t. It must have felt alienating and embarrassing. But once again Gladden is gracious and accepting, and the jurors’ genuine outpouring of love for him proves that being good is catching.

If Gladden had flown off the handle, been mean or rude at any stage, the show might’ve been funnier but it wouldn’t have had heart. As they say, good things take time, and you have to stick with Jury Duty right through to the end to get the good but it’s worth it. I hope they never do it to anyone else ever again.

HE SAW

We stumbled across it, weren’t immediately hooked, came back to it when a friend told us it was good, put it to one side again, came back to it when Succession finished, and finished it in a rapid burst last night after seeing a New York Times article about it headlined: “Their Show Flew Under the Radar. TikTok Blew It Up.”

From the opening episode, when you learn you’re watching a courtroom version of The Truman Show, it’s obvious the whole thing is going to end with some version of “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera”, but what you can’t know, until you’re sitting there during that final reveal, welling up, is how emotionally powerful it will be.

The first few seconds of the reveal actually take place in the final scene of the penultimate show. That acts as a cliffhanger to get you back for the final episode, but more than that, it gives you the time and space as a viewer to digest and deal emotionally with the look on hero Ronald Gladden’s face when he hears the news. That face! It destroyed me. It was so open and guileless, so complex and moving that, were it reducible to a single word, you wouldn’t be able to say it out loud, for fear of exploding the hearts of everyone nearby. I could sit watching a loop of those few seconds for hours. It is not an exaggeration to say Gladden’s face, in that scene, is more compelling than that of the Mona Lisa.

It was already past our bedtime and we had agreed we would save the final episode for the next night. Zanna had been falling asleep but, when she saw that moment, she sat bolt upright and said, “We have to watch the last one.”

I’d expected Gladden to be pissed at everyone for lying to him, for sucking him into a situation in which he was played for a fool, but that’s not what happened. Instead, everybody on the show talked about how they’d fallen in love with him and he talked about how he’d fallen in love with them, or at least some version of them, based on the characters they’d invented to exploit him for our entertainment.

What my surprising and somewhat embarrassing tears suggested was that, in spite of the show’s many concerning ethical breaches, Gladden had, in a very short period of time, become part of a family. And what that suggested was that, in these times of great division, a sense of family is something that remains available to us, that there is still at least a jury’s worth of good in the world.

And yes, I’m aware this is an almost identical argument to the one used by fans of Ted Lasso, but you can’t compare the two. Ted Lasso is no Ronald Gladden.

Jury Duty is streaming now on Prime Video.