‘Jury Duty’ Turned Its Star into a Modern-Day Jimmy Stewart

Freevee’s “Jury Duty” has become one of the most acclaimed and beloved comedies of 2023. Now it has four Emmy nominations — including one for Outstanding Comedy Series — to confirm its status as a pop culture phenomenon. Yet when Cody Heller was approached about showrunning “Jury Duty,” it wasn’t the likelihood that the show would succeed that interested her; it was the fact that it had the potential to bomb spectacularly if its experiment didn’t work. “I thought the idea was brilliant, but I was absolutely terrified,” Heller told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “Like, can this be pulled off? There was something really exciting about the fact that there’s a chance we could totally fail at this.”

The idea that attracted Heller was straightforward but fraught with challenges: stage a fake trial in which every participant was an actor except for juror Ronald Gladden, who thought he was being filmed for a documentary about the legal system coincidentally featuring James Marsden. While there have been plenty of other prank shows and films — one of Heller’s fellow “Jury Duty” producers, Nicholas Hatton, worked on the “Borat” movies — this required an unprecedented level of commitment from a large number of people. “With those movies, it’s getting people on the hook for a couple hours at a time,” Heller said. “This is a very different thing, three and a half weeks of everyone putting on a play and living in this reality.”

In order to make the illusion convincing for Ronald, Heller decided early on that the writers’ room would be populated largely by actors who would also appear in the series; that way, they would be better equipped to improvise and change their outlines in response to Ronald’s actions and reactions. Heller also sought out actors and writers with actual legal experience like Alan Barinholtz, who left comedy to support his family by practicing law. “This was his first time acting and he holds the whole show together,” Heller said of the actor who plays the trial’s judge. Heller knew that the actors would need to improvise a substantial amount of legal jargon (“I don’t know anything about the judicial system beyond watching ‘Law and Order'”), so actors like Barinholtz were essential. “Every person had their part to play, and if there was one single person who wasn’t present, the whole thing would have fallen apart.”

Of course, the biggest wild card was Ronald, who could have stopped the show in its tracks at any point if he had figured out that the whole trial was a charade. “I give props to Freevee for taking a chance on something that truly could have failed,” Heller said. “There was a chance that in a couple of days, Ronald could have figured out what was going on. He’s a smart guy. We always knew we never wanted to punch down — we were not looking for some dumb guy that we were going to make fun of.” The writers’ idea was always to create the circumstances in which Ronald could go on a classic “hero’s journey” where he would fight for justice as the foreman on his jury.

That said, Heller and her collaborators were surprised when Ronald turned out to be as compelling a protagonist as he became. “Not only did he meet our expectations at every turn, he wildly exceeded them,” Heller said. In crafting the show’s outlines, Heller and the writers tried to create circumstances in which Ronald could make his own decisions while being gently guided toward a dramatic outcome. “We were very deliberate in setting him up for no wrong answers. We never wanted to set him up to fail — we wanted to set him up to succeed.” Many of Heller’s favorite moments were unscripted ones, in which Ronald took a genuine interest in his fellow jurors and tried to help them with aspects of the trial or their personal lives. “Those were just Ronald being Ronald. As soon as he became the foreperson, he took the job very seriously, and he is such a smart guy that he was always ahead of us. We were scrambling to stay with him and catch up.”

In the end, Ronald’s decency is what makes “Jury Duty” so much more than a prank show: It’s ultimately a Frank Capraesque fable celebrating the best that humanity has to offer. That’s the heart of its appeal to the audience, and it’s what made the experience special for the people who made it. “Coming out of COVID, when we were all isolated and there’s so much darkness in the world, I wanted to make something that showed that there is goodness in people and that there is a power to people coming together and having a common goal and working toward something,” Heller said. “And that really is what happened. Ronald Gladden restored my faith in humanity. In the final episode when the character of Barbara says, ‘Look, the truth is that we all fell in love with you,’ that was 100 percent genuine.”

The Filmmaker Toolkit podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, and Stitcher. The music used in this podcast is from the “Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present” score, courtesy of composer Nathan Halpern.