“Jury Duty” is back, and it’s leaving the courtroom in the new trailer for Prime Video’s “Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat.”
Like the first season of “Jury Duty,” “Company Retreat” places one unsuspecting individual at the center of an elaborate prank. This time, the show will follow Anthony, new temp employee at Rockin’ Grandma’s Hot Sauce — a fake company set to go on their annual retreat before their CEO steps down.
What Anthony doesn’t know is that he’s the only person present who isn’t an actor.
“I really feel like I’m on a TV show,” Anthony says in the trailer. “But this is not something that you can just make up.” Little does he know.
In 2023’s “Jury Duty” (created by Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky with Cody Heller as a showrunner and Jake Szymanski as a director), the prank centered around Ronald Gladden, a man who didn’t realize he was serving on a fake sequestered jury for a fake trial — with James Marsden serving as an alternate juror. In the show, Gladden won over audiences through a winning, positive personality.
But it would be hard to execute the same concept in the same way without someone catching on. So the “Jury Duty” team instead built up a fake hot sauce company from scratch, using the fake narratives of a company retreat and a CEO changeover as cover for their mockumentary crew.
They’ve been preparing these narratives for a long time. On Aug. 3, 2024, the company announced on PRWeb that they were planning a CEO changeover. On Aug. 14, 2024, @rockingrandmashotsauce made its first post on Instagram, promoting the fictional hot sauce brand as if it was a real company.
“At Rockin’ Grandma’s, we’re all about keeping it real,” the inaugural post ironically starts. At time of reporting, the post only has one like. A slew of other posts soon followed, including early 2010s Internet memes.
Prime Video’s “Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat” will premiere with three episodes on March 20, followed by two episodes on March 27 and three more episodes on April 3.
