On the first day of production for a new series, the actress Rachel Kaly went to introduce herself to a co-star, LaNisa Renee Frederick. Frederick cut her off.
“I don’t want to know your name,” Frederick said. “Don’t tell me.”
This wasn’t rudeness. It was risk management. Kaly and Frederick had been cast in an unusual show — a hybrid fusing scripted comedy, improv comedy, mockumentary and reality TV.
The form was pioneered in 2023 with “Jury Duty,” a show set around a civil trial. All of its filmed participants were actors — including James Marsden, playing a peacocking version of himself. All except for one man, Ronald Gladden, a young solar-power contractor who believed he was doing his civic duty. While scenes were carefully scripted, the actors had to constantly recalibrate depending on Gladden’s actions. “The very scary, high-stakes element of making the show is that it can break at any time,” said Nicholas Hatton, an executive producer.
“Jury Duty” was a surprise hit for Freevee, Amazon’s since-retired ad-supported streaming service. But it was
“seemingly a one-off, unrepeatable. And yet as soon as it aired, the producers began to dream of a second season — bigger, weirder, wilier.
“It was exponentially crazier to pull off,” said Anthony King, a writer on the new season. No one wanted to ruin it by accidentally calling someone by her real name.
That show, “Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat,” premiering on Amazon on Friday, asks if prank lightning can strike twice. In a world in which “Jury Duty” already exists, can another mark be fooled? And will that delight an audience already primed for the show’s goofball twists?
This season’s target is Anthony Norman, a handsome 25-year-old Nashville native hired as a temporary assistant at the fictional Rockin’ Grandma’s hot sauce company. Norman’s job, as he understands it, is to help with the annual company retreat and participate in a documentary on small businesses. The retreat includes corporate seminars, training in what constitutes sexual harassment, feats of daring and skill. Many of these go deliriously wrong.
“You couldn’t even make this up for a TV show, honestly,” a delighted Norman, still very much mid-dupe, says at dinner one night. “Nobody could sit down and write a script like this.” Turns out somebody could.
The producers decided on a company retreat setup for a few reasons: A retreat is semi-hermetic, forced fun lends itself to comedy, and structuring the season around the struggles of a small business allowed the creators to pay homage to some of the themes of the 1980s film comedies they love (David versus Goliath, slobs versus snobs). After a site was found in Agoura Hills, Calif., a crew got to work expanding the existing facilities, building out a yurt for lounging and a hidden control room to manage the shoot.
Norman was aware of about six crew members working on the putative documentary. Dozens more slipped in and out every day out of his sight, and cameras were hidden around the property.
The second season departs from the first in size and depth. In the first season, the jury was sequestered, which meant that filming was helpfully restricted to the courtroom, the jury room and the hotel that housed the jurors.
“I’ll take that any day,” said Jake Szymanski, who has directed every episode. “Because we went from three rooms to three acres of space.”
A jury trial has a rigid structure, trundling from voir dire to testimony to deliberation. A retreat allows for more downtime and spontaneity, which meant Norman could roam more or less at will and that the cast and crew had to be prepared for almost anything.
Jurors are almost always unknown to each other, strangers united by civic circumstance. But the “Company Retreat” cast members had to inhabit characters who had worked together for years. “You have to create back stories and dynamics that would exist among co-workers in an office,” said Lee Eisenberg, an executive producer.
Before Norman arrived at Rockin’ Grandma’s, the actors met for a monthlong rehearsal period during which they invented office culture, home lives, trivia teams, drink orders. (Kaly, whose character worked remotely, spent much of that time watching the TV procedural “Bones,” an obsession for her character.)
They tried to develop personalities and friendships that felt genuine and that would support the show’s essential sweetness.
“You’re not only looking for incredible actors, incredible improvisers, people who can think on their feet and not break,” Szymanski said. “They have to be good people too.”
Norman was cast through a separate process that screened candidates for whether they had seen the original “Jury Duty,” though the producers were cagey about how they did it.
“All I’ll say is that our temp agency had a very thorough interview process,” Szymanski said. Also thorough? The web designers who built fictional sites and social media accounts for the company, the retreat center and the characters.
All the preparation paid off once Norman joined, first at the office and then on the retreat. “I was sweating in my knickers, because I was the first one to greet him, and I could have blown right there,” said Marc Sully Saint-Fleur, who plays the company’s receptionist.
Then again, the office was a safer space, as the producers could communicate with actors through Slack and desk phones. Once everyone was at the retreat, communication was more limited, though some longhaired actresses were given concealed earpieces. (When an actress lost one, her castmates had to pretend that they were helping her look for an earring.)
As much as the producers had tried to plan for every contingency, there were other hiccups — an open window that threatened a plot point, a script page seemingly left on a chair, a camera light glimpsed through a mirror, which Frederick had another actor block with his body. Then there was a nearby wildfire.
“For two years, we stayed up late at night thinking about all the different eventualities,” Hatton said. “Wildfire wasn’t top of the list.”
Luckily, the fire never came close enough to the retreat to force evacuation, and everyone was able to execute a breakneck finale.
“Outside of the birth of my children, it was probably the most exhilarating day of my life,” Hatton said. “Being in that control room as the finale was unfolding, as Anthony was doing what Anthony did, was a singular experience.”
For the cast, the feeling was one of relief.
“I was finally able to breathe,” Saint-Fleur said. “I was like, oh my God, we did it. Like, thank you, Anthony. But I was nervous the whole way.”
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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