How do you write a show when your main character isn’t an actor?
“You essentially have a wild animal on set,” Anthony King said. “Someone who doesn’t know they’re on a television show.”
With Prime Video’s “Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat,” King picked up the third Emmy nomination of his career, for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series. The season followed up on the prank format originally set up in 2023’s “Jury Duty” — placing one non-actor (in this case, Anthony Norman) in a fully simulated environment as an elaborate season-long prank.
In the show’s first season, an unsuspecting Ronald Gladden thought he was serving on a jury that included James Marsden as an alternate juror, unaware that he was surrounded by actors. For “Company Retreat,” King and his peers raised the stakes by making Norman a temp at a “long-established family business,” Rockin’ Grandma’s Hot Sauce, which goes on a group excursion before ownership changes hands.
“Season 1, they were all strangers because they were all jurors,” King said. “Here, we had this enormous amount of backstory and relationships that had to all be very believable for a person to walk into, so there was a ton of writing that’s not even on screen that is just the world of these characters. To make that work, that world had to be able to change and grow in real time.”
King and his fellow writers started the process long before Norman came along, creating backstories and paper trails (including functional social-media accounts and Google Maps listings) for the various companies and characters. They went through weeks of rehearsals to make sure the actors had their characters locked in and were prepared to improvise through any given scenario. Each morning, everyone would secretly meet to prep for the day ahead, ensuring their stories were consistent.
“You’re just trying to think, ‘How could this all fall apart?’” King explained. “If it does, we don’t have a show.”
King said “Company Retreat’s” writers’ room had two goals. The first was to build “the ideal storyline that we want to follow,” a season-long arc that could make compelling narrative television if Norman took the right actions. The second was to figure out ways to push him along on that path, to motivate him to do certain things while also making him feel empowered.
These two goals come to a massive intersection in the season’s penultimate episode, “Mergers and Acquisitions” (for which King earned that third Emmy nod, after previous noms for “Silicon Valley” in 2018 and “Night of Too Many Stars” in 2011). Here, Norman learns that the private-equity firm Triukas, attempting to buy Rockin’ Grandma’s, intends to renege on deals made with the com.pany and its employees. This sends him on a mad quest to stop the CEO from signing his family company away—what King called a “broad comedic farce in real time.”
“We’re already doing a high-wire act,” he said. “Let’s take it to the infinite level.”
King built out a “slobs vs. snobs” finale where Norman leaves a classy dinner to executive producer Todd Schulman sprint downhill in an attempt to stop the signing. He then bursts into a conference room, making an impassioned plea to the company owner not to sell his family business. Sitting in a hidden video village as he watched Norman immersed in the story the writers had created, King couldn’t help but feel that all of their work had truly paid off.
“When he connected with Doug and said, ‘Father to father,’ my stomach dropped out of my body,” King said. “We not only got him there, but he is fully invested in this world. This world is real to him. That is thrilling, complicated—all these things that make up this show.”
The scene poses a question King and his colleagues set out to answer at the top of the season: “Can we take a person who has no reason to care about this com.pany or these people, and by the end of this journey have them care so much that they’ll go above and beyond and literally save the company?”
The answer is clear.
This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Comedy issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
