‘Jury Duty’ Is The Best Streaming Show You Can Watch For Free

At a certain point, I can only have a show recommended to me so many times before I sit down and watch it, and in this case that show is Jury Duty, which I am now, in turn, here to recommend to you.

Part of the reason I hadn’t heard of it is probably because where you have to watch it, Freevee, which is a ridiculously named subsection of Amazon Prime Video which is a bunch of shows punctuated by somewhat traditional TV-style ads as you watch, or for the modern era, YouTube interstitial ads you cannot skip. That part sucks but I mean, it’s 30-90 seconds, not like 4-5 minutes like TV used to be. Just scroll Instagram on your phone or whatever.

But Jury Duty is worth the commercials. It’s easy to recommend to anyone, and is probably one of the most wholesome series I can remember watching in recent memories. Well, not “wholesome” as in the whole family can watch, particularly when you get to one part about “soaking,” but wholesome as in it’s a really feel-good series, like the way Ted Lasso used to be before it got more than one season.

The concept of Jury Duty marries reality TV and a scripted, Office-style series in a way I was kind of too stupid to understand for an episode or two, but then I finally got what they were doing.

The idea is to take one normal guy, Ronald, and create an elaborate, Truman Show-style world around him. Ronald thinks he’s taking part in a documentary about what it’s like to serve on a jury. In reality, the courthouse, the other jurors, the lawyers, the judge, the entire case is fake, and tailored around his actions to see what he’ll do when thrust into increasingly bizarre situations.

If you’re an avid TV or film-watcher, you may in fact recognize at least a couple of people here as “that guys” from various other things. The one exception here is James Marsden, who is a big enough star where they just have him playing…himself. Well, an ego-centric, clueless version of himself (I’ve interviewed him, he’s great!).

The genius of the show isn’t fully realized until the end, when you understand just what it took to make this work. While everyone is acting and there’s a lot of the show that’s scripted, because Ronald is unscripted, they have to often improvise and react to what he does. So they plan out different scenarios to sort of herd Ronald and alter the series based on what he might do. The “test” here is if Ronald will lose his cool as a number of bizarre and strange situations unfold, or if he’ll power through it. Spoiler alert: Ronald is a great guy, and despite not being the only actor, is the star of the show. There’s currently a debate about whether or not he should be able to be nominated for a comedy Emmy given that he wasn’t actually acting (I don’t think his “performance” counts, but I love him all the same).

I don’t want to go too deep into all the absurdity that unfolds here, but this is a series you should absolutely watch, and anyone can, because it’s free with ads on Freevee. It seems like a big miss that Amazon didn’t scoop it up for Prime itself, a service badly in need of buzzy hits, but whatever. Just watch it, it’s great.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Subscribe to my free weekly content round-up newsletter, God Rolls.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.