TV Talk: ‘Jury Duty’ is ‘Joe Schmo’ redux; it's game on for Pirates on AT&T SportsNet Pittsburgh

Amazon Freevee’s “Jury Duty,” streaming Friday, is “The Joe Schmo Show” by another name.

Pittsburghers played the Schmoes in several seasons of “Joe Schmo,” but the “Jury Duty” schmo, Ronald Gladden, is a solar contractor from San Diego.

Gladden thinks he’s been picked for jury duty but it turns out everyone else in the Los Angeles County courthouse where the show filmed — the judge, the plaintiff, the other jury members — are all actors.

“Jury Duty” executive producer Todd Schulman said in a Zoom interview Tuesday the courthouse used for the show had been closed and was being used for storage until the production rented it out and spruced it up for filming.

Actor James Marsden shows up, playing himself as a narcissistic actor desperate to get out of jury duty. Some of his actorly flourishes are over the top — he pays for a private bailiff (not a real thing) so he can go home at night and doesn’t have to bunk at a hotel with his fellow sequestered jurors — but Marsden’s presence is a boon to “Jury Duty” as he effortlessly bonds with Gladden. (“James was totally game and got what we were trying to do,” Schulman said.)

The fake legal case is incidental — an aloof, well-coiffed woman sues a former employee over an on-the-job incident — but it does provide some comedic fodder along the way.

“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.

The humor comes from Gladden’s natural reactions to the mounting absurdity and his occasional foot-in-mouth moments, like when he tells Marsden he heard “Sonic,” which starred Marsden, was “not a good movie.” Feeling bad, Gladden goes home and watches “Sonic” and returns to court the next day to apologize and then rave to Marsden about how much he liked “Sonic.”

That “Jury Duty” works initially is largely due to the casting of Gladden, who comes across as a genuinely decent guy, the same formula that worked with Pittsburgh native Matt Kennedy Gould in the original “Joe Schmo Show.”

“Matt was never really the butt of the joke,” Schulman noted. “For the most part, it was about celebrating this guy and making everyone around him the weirdos.”

Early “Jury Duty” episodes benefit from using the contours of a trial to build comedic moments, particularly when they’re polling potential jurors and the judge lets one older woman go after her excuse for wanting to avoid jury duty is that “it’s just not my thing,” while people with legitimate excuses get empaneled.

The show finds clever ways to work Gladden into the plot. After he mentions a “Family Guy” episode showed Peter Griffin trying to get out of jury duty by claiming to be racist, one of the potential jurors in the “Jury Duty” trial makes the same claim, shooting glances at Gladden, who is overcome with discomfort.

When “Jury Duty” sticks to the court proceedings, where producers have a greater hand in controlling for comedic storytelling (a character witness for the defendant is revealed to have a truly bizarre, hilarious kink), the show shines. But long stretches of episode five during jurors’ sequestration — with Gladden helping Marsden run lines for Marsden’s role in a movie — get dull fast.

Unlike “Joe Schmo,” where viewers saw the actors behind-the-scenes with some regularity, “Jury Duty” doesn’t pull back the curtain until the final episode when the judge, played by the lawyer-turned-actor father of comic actor Ike Barinholtz, tells Gladden what’s really going on.

Schulman acknowledged this series “stands on the shoulders of ‘The Joe Schmo Show,’ ” but he said producers tried to ground “Jury Duty” more as a comedy.

“The premise that I was always most excited about was, what if you made ‘The Office,’ but Jim was a real person and he didn’t know that Dwight and Michael Scott were actors,” Schulman said. “It felt important to lock the audience into the narrative and then we’ll give you the dessert (and go behind the scenes) in the eighth episode.”

Given the similarities between “Jury Duty” and “Joe Schmo,” I emailed the three Pittsburghers who were the unwitting real people surrounded by actors in “The Joe Schmo Show” — Matt Kennedy Gould (2003), Amanda Naughton (2004) and Chase Rogan (2013) — to see if they had been contacted by anyone involved with “Jury Duty.”

Gould and Naughton responded, saying they had not heard from any of the “Jury Duty” producers or Gladden — you could imagine the former schmoes would be pretty good consultants on a show like this — and they’d never heard of “Jury Duty” but were intrigued to check it out.

Pirates games return to AT&T SportsNet

Despite parent company Warner Bros. Discovery’s stated intent to exit the regional sports network business, for now it’s business as usual at AT&T SportsNet Pittsburgh, which televised last week’s Pirates season opener and plans live coverage of the Pirates home opener Friday (pre-game show at 3 p.m.; game starts at 4 p.m.).

My understanding is the intent is to avoid any interruption of Pirates games on cable as WBD and the teams work out a transition plan.

In the end, it’s expected that the teams themselves (or an ownership group) will ultimately take control of WBD’s regional sports channels, including AT&T SportsNet Pittsburgh.

‘Flashdance’ turns 40

What a feeling!

Filmed-in-Pittsburgh movie “Flashdance” was released April 15, 1983, and to celebrate its 40th anniversary next week, Paramount Pictures will release a 4K Ultra HD remastered Blu-ray edition of the film on Tuesday.

Jennifer Beals stars in “Flashdance” as Alex, an 18-year-old welder by day and an exotic dancer by night, who is determined to study at the Pittsburgh Conservatory of Dance.

The new release ($25.99) does not include new bonus features, just bonus material from past releases.

Channel surfing

Showtime canceled “The L Word: Generation Q” after three seasons, but Showtime may consider a reboot of the original series. … “Game of Thrones” veteran Kit Harrington (AKA Jon Snow) joins season three of HBO’s “Industry,” which begins filming next month and stars Carnegie Mellon University grad Myha’la Herrold.