When a good-hearted everyman steps into the elaborately contrived world of Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat, the cast and crew can only hope he’ll do the right things — and avoid opening the wrong doors.
Anyone flipping through the “employee handbook” for Rockin’ Grandma’s would believe it’s a legitimate hot sauce company. Clocking in at more than 100 pages, the dossier offers insights into all the employees’ histories, the origins of this mom-and-pop business, years of profit-and-loss statements and even how the offices are managed, including security codes, thermostat settings and who turns the lights off at night. But thorough as it is, none of it is real. The company, the employees and the offices are all fake –– an elaborate fabrication for Prime Video’s Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat.
Season one of the Emmy-nominated series followed Ronald Gladden, a real person who showed up for jury duty and unknowingly became the centerpiece of an elaborate comedic experiment, one that tested his good nature with a colorful pool of jurors and increasingly unhinged predicaments. Only at the end was he clued in that all the cameras he thought were filming the minutiae of civic responsibility for a documentary were actually trained on him. Everyone from the judge to the jurors to the lawyers were actors, all performing within a meticulously controlled environment that was both genuinely funny and, ultimately, proof that good people still exist.
Emily Pendergast and Marc-Sully Saint-Fleur set the scene for a client mixer.
“Good, decent people are out there,” executive producer Nicholas Hatton says. “We just have this very elaborate, silly apparatus that allows us to highlight some of these folks in a funny way.”
For their eight-episode second season, the producers wanted to up the ante, but they admit they were almost too ambitious. Mere hours before the big reveal, a simple mistake — an open window on a Volkswagen Beetle — nearly ruined years of planning, months of rehearsing and nearly 3,600 hours of footage. (More on that later.) But that was always a possibility with this project: One wrong move and they don’t have a show. That adrenaline rush is also what brought the creative team back for round two.
Before anything, though, they had to decide on the new setting: a company retreat, where employees are still on the clock, but the change in scenery can open the door to awkward situations. To wrap their arms around the location change, the producers did some immersive prep by going on their own retreat to Ojai, California, where they planned out their risky next steps.
“I thought working on Jury Duty was difficult, and then I look back and realize we were in three rooms,” director and executive producer Jake Szymanski says. “I’d kill to only be in three rooms now! For Company Retreat, we were on three acres of living and working space. For some reason, we went and made it about 100 times harder on ourselves. We had to put so much more prep and planning into it.”
That prep included creating an entire company and hiring a cast of “employees” who could convince anyone that they had been selling hot sauce together for years. Season one presented a jury of strangers, but this season is about a work family with an intricate shared history that can’t just be rewritten in a moment of desperation.
Rachel Kaly shields herself from the sun as Rockin’ Grandma’s kooky IT expert.
Alex Bonifer, who plays Dougie Jr., bumbling heir to the Rockin’ Grandma’s company, had the added pressure of playing alongside his character’s father, Doug Sr. (Jerry Hauck), who uses the retreat to hand over the reins of power to his son. “This was supposed to be someone I’ve known my entire life,” Bonifer says. “So, Jerry and I built a full family tree, because we had to know the lineage by heart. My great grandma, Rosalind, I had to know which side of the family she was on, who her husband was, how she was related to my dad. Jerry and I chose the names of our real grandfathers to be the names of our shared relatives to make it easy on ourselves.”
Emily Pendergast, who plays customer relations rep Amy, had to forget a whole friendship while building new ones, because she and Bonifer are members of the Groundlings sketch comedy troupe. But even with that prior familiarity, she says the characters they built are what they would metaphorically live and die by.
“I felt like we all were walking around with live grenades,” she says. “But creating characters like Amy is my currency. Finding those nuances. As long as you have truth in who you are, who the people around you are, and you have each other’s backs unconditionally, you can truly make anything work.”
This is where the employee handbook was key. The cast both contributed to it and memorized it so they could trust it as if it were real. “We actually had our cast work on their characters for a couple weeks and then give character presentations to each other,” Szymanski says. “We treated it like a real day at the company. They were giving progress reports for their divisions, but they were character progress reports.”
But none of it would work without the right hero. Coming off season one, which brought Gladden newfound fame and landed him a two-year overall deal with Amazon MGM Studios, the producers faced a tall order again: find someone charismatic, genuine, empathetic and kind. The person couldn’t be well-versed in television, or they might recognize Pendergast from Veep or Bonifer from Kevin Can F**k Himself. They also had to be open to surprises, because getting to the end with someone who can’t laugh at the journey won’t make for a happy ending.
“Our North Star is that the joke is never at their expense,” cocreator and executive producer Lee Eisenberg says. “We never punch down, because they’re very much part of this shared experience.”
The hidden crew of Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat, including director Jake Szymanski (with walkie-talkie), watches the madness unfold.
They found their man in a 25-year-old temp worker and dad from Nashville named Anthony Norman. After two seasons, Hatton says he has a clearer idea of the perfect candidate for this show: “Basic empathy and charisma go a long way, but it’s also a degree of self-possession, which is something I’ve thought about a lot, because I’ve come to know both our heroes pretty well over the last few years. Ronald and Anthony both have a lack of personal insecurity that allows them to just receive the world and strangers in good faith and to take people as they come, which is an incredible ability.”
Norman arrived the day before the company left for its retreat, giving him just enough time to get the lay of the land and the personalities. Over the next week of shenanigans, he admitted in confessionals that he questioned the confluence of weird events, but dismissed any ideas it might be fake because even TV isn’t this outlandish.
“It’s hard to let your mind go there for too long,” Norman says. “But at the same time, the amount of detail that went into making this world around me is what always convinced me it was real.”
From the first day at Oak Canyon Ranch in Agoura, California, Norman took his job (assistant to HR manager Kevin Gomez, played by Ryan Perez) very seriously; he became a support system for every single employee, in a way that took the actors by surprise. On the first day, Kevin enlisted Norman’s help to propose to Amy, despite having never even asked her out on a date. The cringe-worthy scene imploded as planned and sent Kevin fleeing and his temp with a choice — follow your boss and bail or stay and do the job. Spoiler alert: He stayed.
“That was one of those early clarifying ideas to crystallize who Anthony is and what he came for,” Szymanski says. “It’s part of Anthony’s nature. He’s all about being a team player and doing what he can to help and trying to do the right thing. Him staying let us know early that we had the right guy.”
This article originally appeared in its entirety in emmy Magazine, issue #4, 2026, under the title "Secret Sauce."
