Prime Video’s “Jury Duty” Acquits Itself Well With Its Sequel, “Company Retreat”

2023’s “Jury Duty” was one of the best surprises of TV that year—hosted on Amazon’s still-running Freevee channel, it was a mix of courtroom drama, reality TV, and comedy that put an unlikely subject (at that time of the season, gentle Glanner) in the middle of Ronald’s situation (a court case) and surrounded him with actors playing the characters. The villains and the development of the plot were carefully arranged around him, the entire ecosystem of the “Truman Show” designed to confuse one ordinary man who did not know that he was in the middle of an improvised sitcom.

For all its faults, “Jury Duty” worked like a hoot, so naturally a second season is coming quickly on its heels. The problem is, you have to start from scratch; Ronald knows the score, and the second court offense will be treading on familiar ground. So showrunners Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, veterans of “The Office,” returned to terra firma by setting the scene this season not in a courtroom, but a cozy “Company Retreat” for a fictional company. And wouldn’t you know, it would be better than the first one?

Developing “Company Retreat” represents one of the best, as Eisenberg, Stupnitsky, and director Jake Szymanski (“Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates”) hone in on the things that made the first season work so well, while dissecting or downplaying what didn’t. This time, we’re treated to a week-long retreat from Rockin’ Grandma’s Hot Sauce, a legendary family business whose patriarch, Doug (Jerry Hauck), plans to retire and leave the biz to his stoner son Dougie (Alex Bonifer), who you won’t be surprised to learn has just returned from Jamaica for many years, holding on for years. (He’s like Wyatt Koch was Ras Trent too.)

Enter Anthony Norman, our tag, a friendly young man with a smile and an eager-to-please nature who is happy to join the company as a temporary assistant to the company’s head of HR, Kevin (Ryan Perez), who dons the captain’s hat Day One and calls himself “Captain will be at the race” in the entertainment area. But when Kevin is embarrassed by an ill-advised proposal to Amy (Emily Pendergast) and runs away from the farm, Anthony is promoted to captain Fun. More than a fly on the wall, he is fully integrated into this small company family, one connection at a time, and finds himself in the middle of a David-and-Goliath story to save his small business from being sold to a soulless company (which seems to be staffed entirely in red).

And this is where the main character of “Company Retreat” separates himself from the comic of “Jury Duty”, but reserved, Ronald: He jumps into the first role. The first season relies on its outside cast, led by movie star James Marsden as a fictional version of himself, to carry their “hero” through the season. And given that, “Company Retreat” has its fair share of oddities, whether it’s Jim Woods’ warehouse manager Jimmy, who has a lot of white guilt in his past to overcome, or Rachel Kaly’s Claire’s unemployed domestic worker, who will be able to avoid an allergic reaction to a crab because she loves him so much.

But whether it’s the company setting or their subject’s natural charm and extroversion, “Company Retreat” actually manages to make Anthony feel like a character rather than a straight-up outsider. Anthony takes over, invests deeply in the characters around him, and unknowingly makes himself an integral part of this fake company. He rolls with every curveball thrown at him, whether it’s a busy room search for a stolen box of Cool Ranch Doritos or a climactic race to stop Doug from signing his company. (Toward the end of the show, he delivers a rousing speech to save the business, ironically, he CAN’T write. It’s enough to make you cry.)

It helps, of course, that the show never feels like it’s making fun of Anthony outright or making him look silly. There’s a deep source of sympathy at work in both seasons of “Judge Jobs,” where people face extraordinary circumstances and receive, frankly, admirable grace. Watch Anthony’s self-restraint upon discovering that one worker had drunk what he thought was a large bottle of water but was, in fact, Fleshlight, or how he leans on the team clock in the episode “Bones” with the insistence of another worker. “I feel like I’m on a TV show, but this is not something you can fix,” Anthony said early on; it is ridiculous, in fact, that it is simple it should accept them as real and navigate as best he can.

And that, of course, is the difficult problem underlying the premise of “Judge Work”: What are the ethics of deceiving someone in this way for weeks on end? Especially if, unlike last season, this is a person who was told that he was gainfully employed, found out that the company he thought he was saved from, and his friends were never real? As in Season 1, we get the requisite rug-pull, and the final episode where we see all the logistical legerdomain needed to pull off the prank, and it’s as impressive as it is heartwarming. The cast all talk to her about feeling a connection to Anthony, and she admits the same. But can you, when everything is built on lies?

But it’s easy to put aside these looming moral questions when “Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat” manages to pull off the impossible task of striking twice. All while making the subject of his deception seem like a rube, but he is undoubtedly a saint who brings out the best in everyone around him. And to do that while also delivering a deep laugh is nothing short of a miracle.

The entire season was screened for review. It premieres March 20 on Prime Video.