'Jury Duty' Is Back, and So Is Its Annoying Habit of Making You Believe in People

The first season of Jury Duty kind of came out of nowhere in 2023 and gave the world a taste of earnest goodness at a moment when the world seemed to be running dangerously low on it. A guy named Ronald Gladden was placed on a jury — unbeknownst to him — alongside an entire cast of actors, including James Marsden, who stole the damn show playing a heightened version of himself. No matter how absurd things got, Gladden did his level best to rise to every bizarre occasion and became something of a television folk hero for the radical act of just being a decent, kind human being. And Marsden really was a godsend.

It’s been nearly three years, but Jury Duty is back with Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat — a whole new cast, no jury, an entirely new premise, and another good guy doing his damnedest to make the best of increasingly unhinged situations.

This time, it’s a guy named Anthony Norman, a good-natured temp who agrees to work a company retreat for the “Rockin’ Grandma’s” hot sauce company. And God bless creators Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky — and whoever does the casting — because they’ve found another gem of a human being. Anthony is a guy with the rare ability to recognize that everything around him has gone completely off the rails while remaining warmhearted and generous enough not to bolt at the first sign of disaster. I don’t know what his hourly rate is, but it isn’t nearly enough.

In the very first episode, Anthony is taken under the wing of the HR director — a man who wears a Captain’s Hat and insists on being called Captain Fun — and gets conscripted into helping him plan a marriage proposal to a coworker who once joked, casually, that if they were both still single at 40, they’d just marry each other. The coworker did not mean it. The proposal goes about as well as you’d expect. The HR director, thoroughly humiliated, tries to play it off as a bit before abandoning the retreat entirely out of sheer embarrassment, leaving Anthony to pick up the pieces solo. It is deeply painful in the best possible way. Eisenberg and Stupnitsky — veteran writers on The Office — seems well suited to created Michael Scott situations like these for Anthony to navigate.

What says everything about Anthony is that over the course of this multi-day retreat, he doesn’t flinch when one kooky character after another not only confides in him but actively solicits his help. It helps that while the ensemble isn’t exactly a group of rocket scientists — or, shall we say, models of political correctness — none of them are malicious. They’re just disasters. Lovable, well-meaning disasters.

Chief among them is Dougie, the doofus heir to the hot sauce empire. The entire retreat has been orchestrated to transfer the company from its CEO to this guy, who has absolutely no business running a company. “People just think that this job was handed to me,” Dougie explains earnestly. “I’m just excited to prove that it’s not, like a handjob, but an earn job.” Anthony clearly clocks that Dougie is an idiot, but bonds with him anyway — nothing bonds people quite like shared humiliation trauma — and does his level best to help Dougie and the rest navigate one catastrophe after another, including the moment Dougie unveils his new hot sauce flavor, which, due to a label design error, hits the table under the proud branding of “Rockin’ Grandma’s Jerk-Off Sauce.”

I’ll grant that some of the novelty from the first season has worn off, and no one in this cast has yet delivered anything close to what James Marsden brought to the original. But — and it’s a meaningful but — the show remains both genuinely funny and deeply satisfying in the way only this particular format can be. There’s something that keeps hitting different about watching someone choose, again and again, to be the best person in the room.

What makes Anthony especially compelling is that unlike Ronald, who was primarily a beacon of decency, Anthony is also weirdly, legitimately good at his job. He doesn’t just absorb the chaos — he takes ownership, cheerleads the team, and becomes the ultimate utility player on a squad that seems to be conspiring to make his life impossible. He’s not the guy you’d call to fix a crisis. But he is absolutely the guy you’d want holding everyone else’s hand while someone else did.

The first three episodes of ‘Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat’ premiere Friday, March 20th, and will air weekly thereafter.