There’s only one non-actor on ‘Jury Duty.’ It could have been cruel — instead, it’s TV’s most heartwarming comedy

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“Jury Duty” is unlikely to restore your faith in the justice system; it might give your faith in humanity a boost, though.

The series — part “Truman Show,” part cringe comedy à la “The Office” — became a much talked about hit south of the border when it debuted in April on Amazon Freevee. It finally premiered in Canada last week on Amazon’s Prime Video.

Its star is ordinary guy Ronald Gladden, a 30-year-old solar panel contractor who was told he was taking part in a documentary about the jury system. In fact, he was part of a fake civil court case in which everyone else, right down to the bailiff (Rashida Olayiwola), was an actor.

The fun of the show is in seeing how Ronald reacts to the shenanigans of his fellow jurors, “Office”-like character types who evoke mostly low-level absurdity: enough to produce comedic moments; not enough to tip off Ronald to the scam.

Easygoing and kind to a fault, Ronald takes whatever weirdness is happening around him in stride.

When one juror tells Ronald he’s going to the bathroom before court starts to “rub one out,” i.e. to masturbate, an unperturbed Ronald responds, “Yeah, do it now while you’ve got the time.”

Nowhere is his equanimity more on display than in his treatment of fellow juror Todd (David Brown), a supposed cybernetics geek and the type of guy you’d likely give a wide berth to on the subway.

Ronald diplomatically describes Todd — who, in the series’ craziest visual gag, shows up for court one day in a pair of “chair pants,” crutches and cushions harnessed to his butt — as “a very interesting individual.” He even watches the movie “A Bug’s Life” with Todd, about a misfit inventor ant, “to kind of let him know that those kind of people tend to be misunderstood in society.”

Meanwhile, as jury foreman, Ronald takes the silly court case in respectful seriousness, a sort of David and Goliath battle in which a self-absorbed rich woman with a virtue-signalling clothing company — given the appropriately twee hipster name of Cinnamon and Sparrow — sues a stoner employee accused of botching a T-shirt order and ruining the business.

It’s not “12 Angry Men,” but Ronald patiently and earnestly guides his fellow jurors to a verdict in “Jury Duty’s” penultimate episode.

Ronald, of course, is an unwitting actor in the show since his reactions dictate what happens next.

Actor James Marsden (“X-Men,” “Westworld”), who plays a comically narcissistic version of himself, says in the eighth and final episode, in which Ronald is finally let in on the deception, that reacting to Ronald’s reactions was like “flying without a net” for the actors.

So how does Ronald react when he finds out he’s been pranked? With the same good-natured grace he displays throughout the series.

And though the trial was fake, the bonds that formed between Ronald and his fellow “jurors” were real. “Here’s the deal: we all fell in love with you,” says Susan Berger, who plays senior citizen juror Barbara.

Chances are, as a viewer, you will too.

We’re told Ronald is still friends with the cast, including Marsden. Not surprisingly, Ronald has become a celebrity himself, even starring in a commercial with Ryan Reynolds. And in a perfect postscript to the show, last week he got summoned for actual jury duty.

In cringe comedy ‘The Rehearsal,’ discomfort is the point

In “The Rehearsal,” the critically acclaimed 2022 comedy series from Canadian Nathan Fielder, the subjects aren’t being pranked exactly.

They apparently willingly signed up for Fielder’s social experiment, in which he helps ordinary people rehearse potentially difficult moments in their lives, but there’s a level of manipulation going on that belies the supposed benevolence of Fielder’s interventions.

“The Rehearsal” really falls into the “you have to see it to believe it” category.

For instance, in the first “rehearsal,” a man wants to confess to one of the members of his bar trivia team that he lied about having a master’s degree.

Fielder not only has the man rehearse the conversation over and over again with an actor playing his teammate in a meticulously detailed replica of the Brooklyn bar, he secretly digitally maps the man’s apartment and then builds a replica apartment in which he rehearses his own conversations with the man using a look-alike actor.

And, naturally, neither Fielder’s interactions with the subject nor the subject’s with his teammate go the same way in real life as in the rehearsals.

That’s even more true for the rehearsal that plays out over five of the series’ six episodes, in which a woman who wants to try out motherhood is set up in a house in rural Oregon with a series of child actors playing her “son” at various ages.

Fielder steps in to play father to the fake kids, a delusion that seems to have real consequences when Fielder and the woman fall out over religion, and one of the child actors develops an attachment to Fielder.

At points like that, it’s hard to call “The Rehearsal” a comedy but, given that it’s Fielder pulling the strings, the so-called “king of cringe,” the discomfort is undoubtedly the point.

A second season of “The Rehearsal” is reportedly in the works.

Debra Yeo is a deputy editor and a contributor to the Star’s Culture section. She is based in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @realityeo

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