One of my favourite parts of the way Amazon tends to build up the hype for a new season of one of its shows is releasing the previous season for free on YouTube. It's a trick it's pulled quite a few times, from Fallout to To All The Boys I've Loved Before, and I can only assume it sees a clear return on the investment of letting that content out for free to encourage people to subscribe for more.
Now it's pulling the same trick again – and this time it's for a show that I've wanted to watch for ages: Jury Duty. The genre-bending semi-real comedy series is coming back for a second round on 20 March in the form of Company Retreat, but now you can catch the whole of the first season for free on YouTube.
The huge innovation at the heart of Jury Duty is a simple one; it takes one real member of the public, in this case a nice guy called Ronald, and places him into an extended situation that he doesn't realise is completely scripted. Every single other person he interacts with on camera is an actor, and he's the only one who's not in on the joke.
So, when the seemingly real-life jury duty that he's been drawn for needs to be sequestered from the public for a week, that gives the production team the environment to put him in an ever-escalating series of funny scenarios, with a larger-than-life cast of jurors to contend with.
He thinks he's in a cutting-edge documentary series showing Americans what the realities of a trial actually look like for jurors, but he's in fact in a crazy, high-concept false life. To top things off, the other jurors aren't just facsimiles of random people – one of them is actor James Marsden, playing a fairly insufferable version of himself.
In the first episode Marsden (or the scripted version of him) does his level best to get excused from duty, for instance, but can't quite wriggle away despite cooking up some paparazzi to interrupt proceedings at one point. You can see Ronald starting to get amazed at the situation he finds himself in, and the show reportedly only gets better from here.
In fact, it was widely touted as one of the funniest new TV shows in 2023 when it came out, and certainly might be in the running as the funniest material Prime Video's ever produced. It seems like the perfect way to prep for Company Retreat, and is a great example of how waiting for freebies can be just as good as subscribing to one of the best streaming services out there.
