Stories that Stretch Us: Jury Duty as Anti-Rage Bait

Recently, my wife and I binged Jury Duty: Company Retreat, and I don’t know how to feel about it. The finale stayed in my brain for days after, as I tried to alternately lionize it and shoot holes in its gimmicks. As a show, maybe it’s too strange to do either.

The premise of Jury Duty is like that of any sitcom: a cast of zany characters is confronted with a somewhat ridiculous problem, eventually bumbling their way to an even zanier solution. The twist on Jury Duty is that everyone is a paid actor except for one person. That real person lives a sitcom for a week or more of their lives and doesn’t know it—until the big reveal at the end.

In season one, true to the show’s name, Ronald Gladden found himself chosen for jury duty in what he thought was an actual trial. By shows end, Gladden had led the jury to acquit an innocent defendant before he found out that literally everything about the trial was fake.

On season two, Jury Duty: Company Retreat, the show forgoes the premise of a trial. Instead, Anthony Norman is hired as a temp for a small, family-owned hot sauce company and immediately goes on a company retreat with them, where a crisis in the succession of the company plays out.

In both seasons, the real main character not only plays along with the over-the-top gags they build into the show, but they also do it in a way you come to admire. Or at least I did.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is the type of story. The type of story that is Jury Duty and I have history.

I once heard a seasoned author field the question “What’s your favorite book?” He’d heard this question before, he acknowledged, and in the moment he could never come up with a single book. By this point in his career, however, he was prepared. Instead of one book, he mentioned a few different ones that he prized and moved to the next question.

Likewise, I find it hard to point to one book or author that is my favorite. Strangely enough—or maybe not—I feel very differently about the question, “What book do you hate?”

Easy. Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

I read Tess as a senior in high school and loathed it. Sure, I found Thomas Hardy’s Victorian writing style a little tedious. But that wasn’t the issue.

What I hated was the manipulation. Here was Tess, a nice, clueless, lower-class girl. Okay, sure, I’ll pull for her. Then, in one event after another, Hardy leads that nice girl to the point of happiness only to jerk it away. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice—bring her to the brink of happiness in the bucolic milkmaid world where she meets her true love Angel Clare only to have him desert her? Are you kidding me!?

And it only got worse from there. All of Tess’s choices turned out not to be choices at all. It felt manipulative and predetermined, orchestrated to lead to only one off ramp.

I hated it, both the manipulation of Tess as a character and me as a reader, and loudly voiced as much. (Sorry, Miss Van Dyke).

Turns out the kind of writing that Thomas Hardy was doing had a name, naturalism. In naturalist fiction, the forces arrayed against a character—weather, fate, heredity—will necessarily overwhelm that character. In the face of such forces, the character’s only triumph is to keep a stiff upper lip, recognize their smallness, and accept their final moments with dignity. Blech.

So it turns out that it wasn’t really a Tess problem that I had but a naturalism problem. Later, writing a grad school thesis, I came across a discussion of naturalist authors who actually thought of their writing as science experiments: drop a character into a maze like a rat and watch what he does.

Yep. Nope. Not for me.

My antipathy for naturalism helps to explain a few more of my reading (looking at you, Stephen Crane) and viewing experiences, such as my inability to get on board with Breaking Bad when it was all the rage a few years ago. Something felt deterministic to me in that show, too, herding Walter White toward worse and worse choices on the way to his destruction. Sure, this was supposed to be the moment he “broke bad”—all he had to do was make one right decision to get off the hamster wheel of his own demise, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t do it. Breaking Bad is therefore another kind of naturalism, I suppose, one that shares affinities with total depravity, where the “nature” you can’t escape is your own. Either way, I couldn’t buy it.

The point here is that the stories that really shape us are types of stories, especially those we gravitate towards or away from. This is why, as Abby De Groot wrote recently, we should court a wide range of stories, including stories of different types and from different perspectives. It can be good to read something and then think, “I don’t like the way this portrays the world” and then to ask, “Hmm, why is that?”

My dislike of Tess, for example, tells me plenty about how I want to see the world and what I want to believe: that I am in control of my life; that no matter the forces stacked against me, I can choose a way out; that social class is stupid and can be triumphed over, whether by Tess or by me.

American much?

And something similar rises to the surface regarding my inability to accept Walter White’s downward spiral: that rationality or even self-preservation—in short, good, middle class, lifestyle choices—will win out in the end against baser motives.

That’s the point to life, right? To be a good, middle-class rule-follower?

Which brings me back to Jury Duty.

The goal of Jury Duty is to mix the genres of reality TV and sitcom to an extreme level. It’s like the old show Candid Camera (or any of the prank shows since), if the gag lasted not for five minutes but a week. Or it’s the live cameras of Big Brother meeting the cringe of The Office.

In both seasons of Jury Duty, the wonder of the show is how you come to cheer for and appreciate the character of the real person. Somehow, the producers have managed to cast someone who is both easy-going and compassionate yet also savvy enough to juggle all the other bizarre characters. And, warning, I mean Dwight Shrute-level bizarre and beyond.

In fact, the show’s genius is the way it rides the cringe factor on the one hand (how can he go along with all of this?) and the Everyman factor on the other (would I behave this well if I were put in a similar situation?).

It also struck me that the show is just like naturalism, like putting a rat in a maze.

In the season two finale, as Anthony Norman runs to make the final, decisive action of the show, he is acting exactly as the producers and writers want him to. The plot has pointed him in this one direction all along, and he has played along perfectly—impossibly perfectly. Fortunately, Norman does not find himself in the rat maze of naturalism, exactly, or headed towards Tess’s fated off ramp, but instead toward a positive moral choice that we applaud him for. Still, it’s a very clear case of manipulation.

So how am I to feel about it?

It’s the wager of Jury Duty that gets me. Sure, there must be some kind of financial incentive involved for Anthony Norman to stick out the week, but at any point it would be easier—and much more logical—for Anthony Norman to just opt out, to quit the job and blow up the whole show. But he doesn’t.

If naturalism is a kind of writing that shows humans at the mercy of forces greater than themselves, what do we call writing that leads humans to their best impulses, to act on behalf of other human beings, in all their zaniness and flaws? Isn’t that kind of character we want to root for?

But the reality, of course, is that it’s all fake. At the end of the show, Anthony Norman finds this out and must reorient to the people whom he thought he’d come to know and care for. I wonder if it leaves Anthony Norman, leaves us all, yearning for the simple, zany world of sitcoms over the unmasked reality of things? This, too, is the temptation of plots we return to over and over again.

Underneath all the stories we read or watch is the world they build, the window on “reality” they offer us. Tess of the d’Urbervilles shows Tess caught in the machinations of society. Breaking Bad shows the proximity of suburban normalcy and deep darkness.

The implications of Jury Duty, it seems to me, are legion. But its particular window reminded me that it’s possible, against the odds of logic and self-preservation, to make choices on behalf of people you just met, simply because they’re people.

In our present cultural moment, the wager is that people are gullible, that rage bait works, that memes are governance, and that the only truth that matters is the truth of my tribe or my party. We are led to believe civics is a blind alley where we must act, not on behalf of a wide range of people whom we feel compassion and sympathy for, but out of rage against people different than us. Today’s naturalism, today’s manipulative authors, are the creators of the maze of social media that lead us toward very specific ends, and it’s tearing at our national fabric.

In this world, Jury Duty, with its manipulations in a very different direction, is a kind of balm. And it gives me hope for Everyman, for the human impulse toward compassion. One could do worse than be a Ronald Gladden or Anthony Norman.