Critic Reviews
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Jury Duty is working on a lot of levels. ... Jury Duty generates ever more laughs from the everyday absurdities of human interactions as its actors disappear into their constructed identities. But there’s built-in tension, too.
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What it lacks in laughs, it makes up for in charm. Its beating heart of endearment makes this comedy series delightfully stand out. “Jury Duty” pulls its last prank on the audience, wringing our emotions more than belly laughs.
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In the wrong hands, “Jury Duty” could have come across as mean-spirited and condescending, but the overall tone is almost whimsical, and turns into a toast to a regular guy who faces one dilemma after another and almost always does the right thing. We’ll not say how it all turns out, but it’s a most satisfying and just verdict.
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“Jury Duty” starts strong but by episode four (of eight), grows tiresome with occasional bursts of hilarity. It’s another streaming series stretched beyond what the concept will bear.
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With the head of a hidden-camera prank show, the heart of a workplace sitcom, and the body of a true crime documentary, the boundary-blurring new comedy Jury Duty makes for an odd chimera of genres. ... With no inherent hilarity in his obliviousness, getting the odd laugh falls to the stealth players around him, best among them James Marsden as an insecure, preening, vainglorious parody of himself.
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Ronald isn’t a black hole at the center of a show that’s supposed to be about his reactions to stuff, but he’s very much a beige hole. ... This leaves the various actors rather frantically staging a sitcom around a guy who’s just content to be there, even after 17 days of sequestration, and it’s a desperation that causes the format to make very little sense. ... Jury Duty is a bad show for benign reasons.
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The series is constantly pulling its punches in order to keep Ronald in the dark. ... His ordeal, however, merely resonates as a protracted hidden-camera ploy with nothing interesting—or, most frustrating of all, funny—to say about anything.