Amazon continues to find ways to make people who pay them continue to watch ads, and the latest way that I've learned of is the Amazon-owned subsidiary Freevee (short for Free1 TV) and its recent 8-episode show Jury Duty.
Jury Duty is a show about a real life person who isn't an actor and who is surrounded by 100% actors as fellow jurors, the judge, the baliff, the attorneys, and everyone else working in the court.
The premise of the show is that it is ostensibly a "documentary about what it's like being a juror" as a means to excuse cameras following people around in general. The non-actor did sign up to be part of this documentary beforehand, so the amount that I feel bad for what happened to him is lessened a little bit since he did technically sign up to be on film and part of a whole production.
As the jury is "assembled" from the potential candidates, it becomes more and more clear that this show is one part "pranking the one non-actor with more and more ridiculous situations" and another part "office-style documentary but where Jim doesn't know he's a character in it." The writers and largely-ad-libbing actors do a great job of balancing on the line between "just barely believable" and "extremely wacky antics" throughout.
Because the show takes place in LA, the personas represented through the acted roles have a wide variety, but are fun and memorable. I've intentionally buried the lede, but episode one introduces one person who stands out the most of any of the actors, and his performance in this show is incredible.
There's some great satire about acting and courtrooms, they do actually pull off a 17-day staged trial, have staged testimonies, staged deliberations, and then a real verdict presented before the end of the show. All the episodes are available online.
This show is the closest thing I've seen to delivering on The Truman Show as a real television show of maybe anything I've ever watched. There are bits of it that feel like a watered-down version of The Rehearsal, which was another show I greatly enjoyed. There are other aspects that make this show far more suspenseful than The Rehearsal could ever be, which makes it more captivating to me at times. Through watching Jury Duty, I've learned that I would absolutely 100% unironically watch something like The Truman Show if it were a real television show, which was a horrifying realization to make.
I can't say that it was the best content I've watched all year, but it was fun to watch and I did like it.
-
Free with ads, aka not free