Jury Duty: A TV Review - Guilty of Being Funny

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!***

My Rating: 3.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Brevity is the soul of wit and this quick hitting reality/hoax series is brief and funny.

I finally got around to watching Jury Duty, the much-talked-about reality/hoax/sitcom series that premiered in April of this year on Amazon, and I have some thoughts.

The premise of Jury Duty is that a collection of people are called to serve jury duty for a civil trial in Los Angeles. But the twist is that the entire trial is fake, and all of the jurors except one – the target of the hoax, are actors who are in on the scam, as are the fake judge, bailiff, plaintiff and defendant.

The thing about Jury Duty that really surprised me was that unlike nearly every other reality tv show ever made, it actually left me with some hope for humanity.

The “regular guy” who is the target of the hoax is Ronald Gladden, who is the most normal of normal guys imaginable, and he is a really good dude. He treats everyone, no matter how weird or annoying they may be…and they are often very weird and very annoying, with not just respect but with genuine kindness. He also takes his civil duty as a juror seriously and doesn’t just bide his time on jury duty but actually fully engages with the process.

Watching Ronald navigate some very potentially uncomfortable-to-the-point-of-being-ludicrous situations with grace and good-nature restored some of my long-lost hope in humanity.  

The reality, pardon the pun, is that the majority of people in the world are like Ronald, but the vast majority of reality tv, the most loathsome of television genres, is about rewarding boorish behavior and spotlighting self-serving, self-centered, fame-whoring anti-Ronalds.

For this reason, I was skeptical of even giving Jury Duty a try as I assumed it was the usual soulless formula of talentless/narcissistic people masquerading as real people acting like fake people reality tv bullshit that always leaves me irritated, aggravated and depressed. But watching Ronald thoughtfully negotiate through the bizarre situations he is thrust into, and do it with such a pleasant and appealing attitude, not only left me laughing but also optimistic…not a state I’m used to.

Jury duty in real life is like spending time in Darwin’s waiting room, and the series Jury Duty is no different as the fake jurors are a perfect and hilarious encapsulation of the army of morons and misfits that inhabit our world.

For example, there’s Todd, the socially awkward pseudo-inventor, who never fails to be incessantly weird. The actor who plays Todd, David Brown, is remarkable as he repeatedly does the most insane and inane things but never even approaches breaking character or laughing…a Herculean accomplishment.

Joining Todd is Noah, the clueless Mormon, and the far-out floozy Jeannie, who is hungry to take Noah’s virginity.

There’s also the crotchety old lady, Barbara, and Ken, a slow-talking Korean, who are unique enough to be realistic but not so odd as to raise red flags. The same is true of Nikki the bailiff, who I never expected to NOT be a real-life bailiff.

The “star” of the show is actor James Marsden who plays a hyper-narcissistic version of himself. This version of Marsden is constantly talking about his fame and his movies and even gets his own private bailiff so he can stay at home and not be sequestered with the riff raff at a hotel for the trial. Ronald takes all of Marsden’s celebrity quirks in stride and with a smile…even when Marsden takes egregious advantage of him in the most odious (literally) of ways.

I am a pretty tough audience, but Jury Duty was actually able to make me laugh out loud on numerous occasions, something that rarely happens when I watch tv.

The last show that had me laughing and cringing this much was last year’s bizarre, pseudo-reality show The Rehearsal on HBO. In fact, The Rehearsal and Jury Duty would be a fascinating and fantastic double feature to watch back-to-back, as they somewhat inhabit the same documentary/hoax genre but approach it in very different ways.

Jury Duty is a breezy watch, as each of its eight episodes average a brisk 24 minutes or so and keep you engaged the whole time.

So, if you want to experience the absurdist humor of serving on a jury without having to experience the hell of actually serving on a jury, then I strongly recommend you hop into the bizarro-world of Jury Duty.

My final verdict on this show is that it is NOT GUILTY of being the usual reality tv junk and is definitely GUILTY of being funny…and maybe…just maybe…a little bit profound…or at least inspirational.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

The Rehearsal (HBO Max): TV Review

 ****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Batshit, bizarre and brilliant.

“ONE TIME A THING OCCURRED TO ME, WHAT’S REAL AND WHAT’S FOR SALE?” – Vasoline by Stone Temple Pilots

It is very difficult to describe The Rehearsal, a new six-episode series written, directed and starring Nathan Fielder, now streaming on HBO Max.

At first glance, the series is a ‘reality tv’ show about Fielder helping regular people navigate their anxiety by directing elaborate rehearsals of difficult situations they will encounter in the future.

For example, in episode one Fielder assists a man who has been lying to a friend about his level of education and wants to come clean but is worried about how the friend will react. This is pretty standard reality tv stuff…nothing to see here. Except Fielder goes to extraordinary lengths to recreate the setting and the individuals involved in the encounter. He builds an exact replica of the bar where the conversation will take place, and hires actors to play everyone involved except for the man who wants to confess, and then rehearses the hell out of it trying to build a roadmap to follow for any contingency that may arise.

Episode one is amusing for how ridiculous Fielder is in his quest for “authenticity” regarding setting and cast…but it’s child’s play compared to what comes in episodes 2-6. That’s where the show turns the lunacy up to eleven and the absurdity up to infinity.

The first episode actually has almost nothing to do with the rest of the series. I won’t spoil anything vital from episodes 2-6 only because it simply has to be seen to be believed…and even seeing isn’t believing as I assume all of it is as phony as a smile on a two-dollar whore. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t fascinating and insightful.

I’ve never seen any of Nathan Fielder’s earlier work, but from what I understand he’s a comedian/actor and comedic provocateur, so The Rehearsal is, I guess, best described as a docu-comedy…or maybe a mocku-comedy, or maybe an off-the-rails, reality tv social experiment.

I’m a notoriously difficult audience for comedy and am incapable of giving pity laughs. The Rehearsal made me guffaw numerous times, and not with traditional build-ups and payoffs but with subtle, understated, insanely weird moments of glorious absurdity.

Nathan Fielder is the ethically and morally corrupt ringmaster and clown of this straight-faced, three-ring circus, and he’s a passive-aggressive, raging narcissist suffering from supreme self-absorption and cluelessness…and it’s hysterical to behold, even when, or maybe especially when, he acts so superior to the rubes he’s supposedly silently judging, despite being just as ignorant, oblivious and self-delusional as they are.

I have no idea if this Fielder persona is genuine or an act, and I don’t much care. Like Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, Fielder’s persona is able to tell a complex story without ever needing to utter a word.

Fielder’s ‘act’ is, in some ways, sort of a more subdued version of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat work, where he bonds with the audience because he’s in on the joke and uses ‘normal’ people as the punchline. But unlike Borat, Fielder’s insecurities and arrogance keeps slipping out from behind the mask.

The Rehearsal reminded me of a documentary/mockumentary from 1999 titled American Movie, which chronicled some passionate but unfortunate Midwestern filmmakers trying to make a movie that is destined to be terrible. American Movie was all the rage amongst a certain sect of hipster cinephiles back in the day. I even worked on a similar project as a cinematographer/actor in the same time frame. Similar to The Rehearsal, debates raged about whether American Movie was a real documentary or a mockumentary, and the answer is still elusive. I’m less in doubt about the dubious voracity of The Rehearsal.

The Rehearsal is also somewhat reminiscent of the Charlie Kaufman film Synecdoche, NY, which blurs reality and manufactured reality in a post-modern cauldron of existentialism.

And the last thing that The Rehearsal reminded me of was Bo Burnham’s Netflix comedy special, Inside. Although The Rehearsal is nothing like Bo Burnham’s Inside in content and character, it’s similar in the sense that it is undoubtedly a singular work of genius.

Many moons ago while studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, my class did a sort of Meisner-esque exercise where an actor sits on a chair and looks straight ahead. The actor is supposed to be still and just listen to the words other classmates say to them from across the room and see if they generate a genuine, spontaneous emotional or physical reaction.

It's an interesting exercise in that it is meant to remove the impulse of the actor to “show” or indicate and instead just open themselves up, to be and to react organically and naturally.

I had already gone to film school prior to the Royal Academy so I realized during this exercise that it was very similar to the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s Theory of Montage. In layman’s terms Eisenstein’s theory claims that the context surrounding an image is what assists the audience in projecting onto it meaning and emotion. For example, the shot of a stoic face is given meaning if it is preceded or followed by different images. The audience projects upon the stoic face a pleasant demeanor if it is preceded by a baby laughing, and the audience projects a darker meaning if the stoic face is preceded by a shot of war or carnage.

All of this came to mind watching Nathan Fielder, as his usually expressionless face and monotonous voice is a blank canvass upon which the audience can project their own meaning, including their own bias and prejudice.

For example, for much of episodes 2-6, Christianity is often positioned to be the butt of the joke by Fielder, who is Jewish. So much so, that at one point that prejudiced sub-text bubbles to the surface as someone openly declares without any opposition, that being a Christian is itself an irredeemable act of anti-Semitism. But afterwards another discussion takes place regarding Judaism, and the previously espoused anti-Christian sentiment is then given more context and its meaning changes radically. This is an instance of Fielder finding insight because of his lack of self-awareness, not in spite of it.

In that class at the Royal Academy there was a student, I’ll call him “Tushy”, who was a recent Ivy league grad, came from a very wealthy family, and seemingly had everything going for him, and yet he still felt the need to tell everyone fantastical stories about the famous women he had dated. Everyone knew these stories were obviously untrue for a variety of reasons, the most obvious of which was that Tushy was very gay, but he and his stories were harmless so nobody really cared.

In the Meisner-esque exercise though, Tushy’s inability to just “be”, which is a form of being honest with yourself and thus your audience, proved a liability. Tushy was incapable of just “being” and had to push and indicate all of the feelings he thought he was supposed to have during the exercise. As an audience member and participant this was uncomfortable to watch because it was so painful, obvious and painfully obvious. The teacher, who was one of the best in the world, gently tried to remind him of the purpose of the exercise and re-direct him to stillness but Tushy would have none of it. He kept pushing and urging himself to have a profound reaction (in this case crying) because he wanted everyone to think he was a profound person having a profound reaction.

There’s a pivotal sequence in The Rehearsal where Nathan Fielder turns into Tushy, and is betrayed by his desperate yearning for profundity and therefore creates a manufactured profundity. Except in this case, Fielder’s forced profundity is actually profound in its own right as it exposes the deeper ‘reality’ about him, his series, and his audience, which is that our culture, marinated in malignant narcissism and saturated with social media, has devolved humanity to the point where we are no longer capable of ever feeling genuine empathy.

On its surface The Rehearsal is a simple bit of reality tv comedy, but beneath that façade is an astoundingly complex piece of work that speaks volumes about the diminished and depraved state of humanity.

The bottom line is that Nathan Fielder is a modern-American holy fool, and his series The Rehearsal is batshit, bizarre and absolutely brilliant.

©2022