The Big Picture

The documentary-style comedy series “Jury Duty” was entirely fake, with only one juror, Ronald Gladden, unaware of the joke. The show’s success relied on Gladden’s nice-guy nature and the carefully planned and orchestrated moments by the entire cast and crew. Showrunner Cody Heller and the team behind “Jury Duty” were both terrified and excited throughout the production, as the show had never been done before. They constantly questioned whether they would be able to pull it off, but the unexpected Emmy nominations added to their excitement and satisfaction. The production of “Jury Duty” was a constantly evolving and fluid process. The entire cast and crew had to be in constant communication and rely on each other, as there was a chance of failure at any moment. They were dedicated to giving Gladden a hero’s journey and creating a show with heart, rather than a prank show meant to embarrass him.

[Editor’s note: The following contains major spoilers about Jury Duty.]In all honesty, Jury Duty never should have worked. The documentary-style comedy series chronicling the inner workings of an American jury trial was actually entirely fake, with only one particular juror, Ronald Gladden, not let in on the joke. Everyone around him, including the other jurors, the judge, the lawyers, and even James Marsden, there to participate in his civic duties, were acting both inside and outside the courtroom in carefully planned and orchestrated moments. At any point in time, Gladden could have unraveled it all, but instead, his nice-guy nature led to some magical moments that were truly TV gold, eventually garnering them four Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Comedy Series.

During this 1-on-1 interview with Collider, showrunner Cody Heller talked about always questioning whether they’d actually be able to pull the series off, the very unexpected Emmy nominations, the both terrifying and exciting experience of making something that had to keep evolving throughout the production, the magic that Gladden brought to the series, the backup plan in the chance that he discovered what was really going on around him, the time spent on perfecting the turd in the toilet, and whether they’ve considered risking it again for another season.

Collider: Congratulations on the Emmy nominations, especially for Outstanding Comedy Series. What does it feel like to have that level of recognition with this show? Going into this, were you just hoping to actually pull it off? Were you ever thinking about anything like this happening?

CODY HELLER: Honestly, it was exactly what you said. I was truly just like, “Can we pull this off? Is it possible? There is a chance of failure.” It was terrifying and also exciting, at the same time, but never in my wildest dreams, did I imagine that it would get this sort of attention. The grassroots with everybody watching it was just so exciting. And then, on top of that, to get the Emmy nominations was just the best thing that could possibly happen. Seriously, everyone on the show, top to bottom, worked so hard and they all deserved it so much. I was just so happy that people responded to it. We set out to make this thing with a very specific intention, and people got that and took it that way. I couldn’t be more thrilled.

Image via Sela Shiloni

There are just so many layers of insanity with this show. It’s a miracle that any TV show actually gets made and gets finished, but then you’re adding in variables that you have no control over, so I can’t imagine what that must have been like, on a daily basis.

HELLER: Terrifying and exciting, at the same time. There were very high highs and low lows. When things were going great, it was like, “This is the most exciting, greatest job, ever.” And then, in the moments when we were scared that he was about to find out, it was, “Oh, my God, all of this hard work is for naught. We’re two weeks in and everyone has given their all, and one little mistake could just blow everything apart.” But that’s part of what made it so special. We all had to come into this thing knowing that it had never been done before and knowing that there was a chance of failure, and all having to put our faith into each other and be in constant communication. The entire cast and crew became an immediate family and we just had to always be so aware of our north star of this being about a hero’s journey for this guy. This is not a prank show. This is not meant to make fun of this guy or embarrass him. Hopefully, it’s funny, but hopefully it also has the heart that we wanted it to have.

Was there any backup plan for if he figured it out before you wanted him to figure it out?

HELLER: There were several things that we floated around. There was one version that Nick Hatton, one of the amazing executive producers came up with, which was, if Ronald [Gladden] found out, we would pull him aside and turn the tables and be like, “Look, okay, you’re right. This is what it is. Can you play along, and now we’re gonna turn it onto the actors?” It was just constantly evolving and fluid and we had to be open to making changes constantly throughout the whole process. That’s what made it so exciting.

You’re not hiring an actor to lead your show. In that kind of circumstance, you’d put him through an audition process and something about them reassures you of what they can do, which is why you cast them. But with this, you’re casting a human being. What was it like to see how he would react? How would that shape things, every day?

HELLER: Alexis Sampietro is the incredible producer who found Ronald. She is just so talented at what she does, and all the credit goes to her and her partner in this, Jordan Cohen. They found Ronald. To find someone, they interviewed over 2,500 different candidates, and they found Ronald. Not only did he meet our expectations, but at every turn, he just exceeded them in ways that we could never have anticipated, and it was amazing to witness. In the writers’ room and throughout the whole process, we were always aware of there being no wrong answers. We wanted to give this guy a hero’s journey, and we wanted him to have a good experience. We did not want to put this guy through anything traumatic or bad, at all. That was not the point, ever. We always tried to make it so that, whatever crossroads he was at and whatever decisions he makes, that there are no wrong answers. Hopefully, whatever decision he made, it was gonna be okay. That being said, he then just blew us away. Some of my favorite moments of the show are things that were not scripted, at all, like him showing A Bug’s Life to Todd and taking him for the make-over, those were things that just came from Ronald. It was just amazing to be able to be a part of such a truly collaborative experience, where we all were making this thing together and the hierarchy didn’t really exist like a normal show. It was just truly a bunch of people coming together, becoming a family, and being like, “Let’s try to make this insane thing that’s never been done before. Let’s see if we can do it.”

Image via Freevee

In the last episode, when we get to see how you pulled all this off, there are moments where we realize how much time was spent on every little thing around him. Could you ever have imagined that you’d work on a project where you’d spend so much time perfecting a turd in a toilet?

HELLER: Dream come true for me. That attention to detail was the day to day. We had to make sure the reality held up, so we were all hyper aware of everything. Everything was constantly changing. There would be things that we didn’t think. Ronald is such a good guy and he actually cared about the case so much that, as soon as he became the foreperson, he really took the job seriously. We found ourselves, like you see in episode eight, having to catch up to him. We were like, “Oh, no, he’s asking about the blood alcohol level. We need to get props to make a thing because he’s asking for that now, and we weren’t ready to have that until next week.” It was this constantly evolving, truly collaborative experiment that luckily we pulled off somehow.

Not everybody would so willingly take the blame for a turd in a toilet.

HELLER: Exactly. This is a little anecdote that I’ll tell you, that didn’t make it into the show, but after you did the reveal, I met Ronald for the first time. My name is Cody, and there’s that whole episode about, is Cody a guy or a girl? And if you remember, in that episode, Ronald does not weigh in. He doesn’t want Noah to be upset, so he’s like, “Don’t worry about it, man.” Everyone’s saying, “I know a lot of guy Codys. Cody is a guy’s name. She’s cheating on you with a guy named Cody.” And Ronald doesn’t say anything, except for just being supportive of Noah and being like, “Don’t worry about it, man. Trust your girl. You’re fine.” So, when we did the reveal, and I went and met Ronald for the first time, and introduced myself, and we started talking, it came out that, in real life, Ronald Gladden’s very best friend is a guy named Cody. The fact that, in the moment, he didn’t just immediately say, “Oh, I do know a guy named Cody,” he held that in intentionally because he did not want to hurt Noah, and that just speaks volumes to what an amazing person Ronald Gladden is.

Did that whole Cody bit end up in the show because of you?

HELLER: Yeah. My entire career, when I was coming up as a writer and it’s just my name on a script, I’d walk into meetings and they’d be like, “Oh, we thought you were gonna be a guy.” I thought it was funny to have this thing about whether or not Cody is a guy or a girl’s name, and it just ended up being in the show. It’s such a coincidence, but the fact that Ronald was so thoughtful to not blurt that out and keep it to himself because he was so aware of not hurting Noah, I just thought it was one of the most amazing and special things that speaks so much to his character.

Image via Freevee

I don’t get caught off guard very often, so I love when things can do that. The sex scene, or just the idea of the sex scene in this, was probably one of the strangest, most bizarre things that I really did not even know how to react to when I was watching it. How did that come about?

HELLER: I have been trying to get soaking into a show for 10 years. I doubt it’s a real thing, but at Brigham Young University, it’s an urban legend that it’s a thing. As soon as I heard about it, it was such a fascinating funny thing that for years I’ve been trying to get it into a show. And because I was the showrunner on this show, I was able to be like, “Hey, we’re gonna do this.” There was a moment when we talked about, “What if Ronald offers to do it?” We never would have allowed that to happen because that would have been a very ethically not okay thing, so we always knew that it was gonna be [James] Marsden. I just think it’s a very funny thing, and I’m glad that people thought it was funny, too.

Were you ever worried that it was so strange that people wouldn’t buy it?

HELLER: To be honest with you, making this show, I was so in the moment of just trying to make it work at all that I was not result oriented. I was not thinking about what the outcome would be. I was just thinking about, “What is the day to day? How can we make this work? How can we do this?” I wasn’t really thinking about, “How will people react to it?” I was just in the writers’ room, pitched it, people liked it, it became a thing, and we went with it. Luckily, Freevee is super cool and supportive, and they just let us do our thing and were amazing partners, throughout the entire process. They were so supportive and really let us just go for it, with the comedy and with the heart and with everything.

Did you have a lot of conversations about how to also explore things outside of the case, or how to include something that Ronald wasn’t necessarily in?

HELLER: Yeah. In the writers’ room, there were conversations about having episodes that were just totally not court related and at the hotel. We struck what I think turned out to be a good balance of court stuff and non court stuff. Every single actor was so talented that we just wanted to let everybody shine, and everybody did shine. Truly, I was in awe, every day, just watching the amount of talent packed into one room, with all those actors. It was inspiring and incredible, and I felt so privileged to be a part of it.

Image via Freevee

Going back to when the show came out, it just kept picking up attention because people kept talking about it. When did you realize the show was blowing up with audiences and that the audience was growing, and that they were also falling in love with this lead who didn’t even know he was the lead?

HELLER: It was so surreal. I can’t even tell you. I’m not on TikTok, but it seems like that’s where it blew up. Also, one of our writers, who’s also on the show, Kerry O’Neill, tweeted about the show and that gave us some momentum. Freevee did an incredible job marketing the show and putting their resources into trying to get viewers to see this thing that’s very unconventional and is something that’s totally new. They did an amazing job. All of us, the whole Jury Duty family, is still a family. We all still have text chains. We keep in touch. We picket together. It’s a whole thing. We were all freaking out, seeing it blow up. It was just like, “Wait, what?! How?!” There’s so much amazing TV out there, nowadays, and it’s so rare for something to pop off in this enormous way. I don’t think any of us saw it coming, and we were all just so thrilled. And we were so thrilled that the audience took it with the intention that we set out with. We wanted it to be funny, but we wanted it to have heart. We never wanted it to be mean to Ronald. We wanted Ronald to have a good experience, throughout.

My favorite things to watch are things that make you laugh, but also make you cry. The biggest compliments, for me personally, are when people say, “I laughed so much, and then I cried in episode 108.” That means the most to me because that means that we really did affect people on an emotional level. Ronald Gladden restored my faith in humanity, and I think the world felt that, too. Ronald Gladden really is such an incredible guy that it’s astonishing. Coming out of COVID and everybody being isolated, I think this was the perfect thing with showing the power of community and what happens when a group of people from all different walks of life, come together and have to work together. Nine times out of 10, they do create a little family and they do work well together. People can overcome their differences, to see each other and respect each other and love each other. And the fact that that carried on into real life, and that truly the actors and Ronald are all still friends, is so rewarding for me, as the mama bear of the show. That fills my heart with so much joy.

Obviously, in success, it’s easy to understand why people would be asking, are you doing this again? Is there going to be another season? But was that something, when you were making this, that even occurred to you, as a possibility? Did it take actually finishing it and having it work, before you could even think about doing this again?

HELLER: I still haven’t even thought about that. I’m still just basking in the moment of the first season. Plus, with the strike, we’re not having those conversations. When Lee [Eisenberg], Gene [Stupnitsky], Dave Bernad and Todd Schulman came to me with this idea, I was like, “I love the idea. It’s awesome. It sounds amazing. I have no idea if I can pull it off. I really don’t.” That was exciting and terrifying, at the same time, so I was like, “You know what? I’m gonna say yes and do this. And then, luckily, I had Nicholas Hatton, who has so much experience doing this kind of stuff, having worked on all the Borat movies, and Andrew Weinberg, who was another EP/writer on the show who’s incredibly talented, and assembling the writers’ room from the beginning, I knew, in order to pull this off, at all, I had to have as many people involved from the beginning as possible. I was like, “I want as many writers who are also performers, so that they could potentially be in the show, as possible.” Having a 10-week writers’ room, and then dismissing everyone and being like, “Okay, we’re going off to make the show with these scripts,” was not the nature of this show. It was constantly changing and evolving, every day, depending on what Ronald did that day. At the end of every day, it would be me, Andrew Weinberg, Nick Hatton and Jake Szymanski, the director, sitting and being like, “Okay, what got accomplished today, story wise? What didn’t?” And then, creating these little beat sheets. Otherwise, there was no way to stick to a script because everything was just constantly changing.

It also feels like, if you do another season, there would have to be conversations about how you could do it, what sort of setting you could do it in, and whether you’d have another recognizable actor, like James Marsden, in the middle of it? Have you had any conversations about having a conversation, once the strike is over?

HELLER: No, we have not.

Image via Freevee

What has most surprised you about the state the industry is currently in? Have you been surprised by the solidarity among the unions and among everybody that’s been out picketing? Is there anything that you’ve learned, just from talking to other union members, that you didn’t even realize before all of this?

HELLER: It’s been incredible. Obviously, I wish that this wasn’t the case. I wish that the AMPTP were more like Ronald Gladden and we could keep working because everyone wants to get back to work. But unfortunately, that’s not the case. My mom is an actress, and she came up in a time where there was a middle class for actors. You could have a career where you were not a famous movie star, but yet, you could afford to buy a home in Los Angeles in the Valley, and that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s a really sad thing to realize that there is no middle class, and that goes for the actors and the writers. There are the top people that make millions of dollars, and then there are the people that struggle. And now, we’re seeing that it’s not just us. It’s an issue across the board, that’s a labor issue. This is just an historic time. I’m trying to remain optimistic. It’s been great to be able to picket with the Jury Duty family. All of us together go and pickets, which makes it feel a little bit like we’re fighting for something and we’re on the right side of history. I’m grateful for my Jury Duty family in this moment, otherwise I would just be so depressed and so defeated. I joined the union in 2011. I worked as a staff writer on two shows. I never worked on a network show, but I worked on two cable shows, and it is really interesting to see the difference between my residuals on those shows, where I was just a staff writer, versus when I’ve been a showrunner/creator/EP on a streamer. Seeing those residual differences really just shows you exactly what the problem is. There are many problems, but that is one of the big problems, and that’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot.

More than just the possibility of the actors cracking up, at any given moment, were you ever worried that the crew, who were posing as the documentary crew, might start laughing or say the wrong thing?

HELLER: We were concerned about everything. The whole thing was so risky and scary and unprecedented, so there was constant anxiety and fear. Every night, I would have the craziest anxiety dreams. But truly, we had the best of the best, from every crew member, every writer, every actor. Everyone just gave their all and were so committed that I just had so much faith in everyone. Ronald thought the crew consisted of three camera guys and two producers and a sound guy. That’s it. He was not aware of the 50 of us in the control room. He had no idea. All the crew that he was aware of, they had to also be actors, in a way, and they all did such an incredible job. I cannot tell you how, every day in that control room, I would just sit there being like, “I can’t believe that I am lucky enough to be working on a thing with this amount of talent, from every single person involved.” It was truly a magical, lightning in a bottle situation. I don’t know if it could be repeated. In the moment, it did feel like magic. It was like, “This is crazy.”

And what a genius idea that the actors playing the lawyers had been lawyers, so that they could also think on their feet.

HELLER: That was one of my main things. As soon as I got hired as the showrunner, I was like, “Okay, we have to have as many writers in the room, that can also potentially be performers, and we have to have all the people that are gonna be speaking in the courtroom, all the legal people, have to have legal experience. There’s no way that we can possibly script out three and a half weeks of material for them to memorize because things are constantly changing anyway and it’s just impossible.” Finding those people was a whole other thing. Everyone pulled their weight and beyond, so much so that I was sitting there just being like, “This is unreal.” I could not believe the level of commitment, talent and care. Everyone cared so much. Everyone was really concerned about Ronald’s well-being. It was never meant to be a prank show. It was never meant to make fun of Ronald. But we also wanted Ronald to have a good experience. We didn’t want him to have a bad experience. We didn’t want him to be traumatized. There was so much care, and everybody really put in so much love. I think it comes across on the screen. The fact that, in real life, everyone is still friends, and with Ronald, it just speaks to the fact that this was a really special, once in a lifetime experience, that I just feel so lucky to have been a part of.

Jury Duty is available to stream at Freevee.