‘Jury Duty’ Nominee Anthony King On Getting Anthony Norman to the Right Place for the Right Time

Working on Amazon Prime’s Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat for producer and Emmy-nominated writer Anthony King was one the most heartwarming and stressful experiences of his career. Never having a set script and having to work around a lead who doesn’t know he is in a fictional show could lead to having to think on the fly to avoid disaster–while also creating a show that was all about empathy and learning to care about people even if you haven’t known them long. Even though the world and characters were fake, the emotion was real and that is what Anthony King took great pride in.

The Contending: You have different writers across the season. So how much collaboration did you guys have to do to try to get to the point you wanted to?

Anthony King: Oh, so much. We had a writer’s room that really kind of broke down the entire season and put it together, like you would on most television shows. The arcs of the whole season and character arcs and where we were going in the story. We just had the added complication of having someone who doesn’t know they’re on a show in the middle of it. Who is kind of our first audience, but also, obviously, is impacting what we do next and the changes we make. So there’s a lot of rewriting in production.

The Contending: When you are at the start of the writing process with everyone, you’re crafting these characters without having met Anthony. For this story to work he needs to like and get invested in them. So, what were the challenges in trying to create characters like that?

Anthony King: That was the big challenge, how to make these characters funny. Some of them are not immediately trustworthy, necessarily. Some of them have things going on. But hopefully they are still likable. We found the thing that was interesting in developing them, especially in the rewriting, once we were in process with Anthony and we were watching it all kind of play out, was we could isolate the characters down to that core want. That relatable thing that we feel in wanting to connect with someone or, like with Dougie Jr., who is kind of an idiot and probably shouldn’t be running a company, but he really wants to do right by his dad and he really wants to make something of himself. Those are things you can connect with, that you hope an audience connects with. But also that we found, as we were doing it, that Anthony was really connecting with.

The Contending: The episode you’re nominated for is the penultimate episode, which is when everything comes together, and you have to get Anthony in the right place at the right time. What was that like to craft? That must have been just incredibly nerve- wracking.

Anthony King: Incredibly nerve-wracking. So the idea from the beginning was, can we bring an intern into a company where he has no reason to really care about these people, he’s just getting a paycheck, and put him in situations where hopefully he builds these connections so that by the end of the season, he will go above and beyond and save the whole company? Which is a big ask. In season one of the show Ronald, who was in that position, was really only ever asked to do his job as the head juror. And so we knew we were asking a much bigger thing, and we have no guarantee that he would do it. My idea for that episode was before that happens in building up to it was to put our hero through almost a real-time farce. Where we are going up the mountain, and down the mountain, and up the mountain, and down the mountain, and bringing in ridiculous characters like the locksmith and the notary, and really just raising both the comedic and the emotional stakes. To push how far we could take this real-time thing we’re doing that cannot have mistakes. To hopefully put him in a place where he doesn’t even have time to think. He’s just reacting emotionally to what’s happening and it becomes go, go, go, go, with the hope that he would go through that door.

The Contending: You’ve mainly worked in traditional sitcoms, so what has been the difference writing for this versus a sitcom?

Anthony King: I mean, a huge difference. The biggest was in the writing room; you could never fully finish a scene because you don’t know who you’re writing for. So, we would write the full scene, and we would write what we hoped the hero would do, and we would discuss ways to use the characters to try to get the hero toward those goals. But when we were actually in production, there was more rewriting than anything I’ve ever been on. Like, every single day at the end of a shoot day, we would stand in this dirt parking lot and talk about what happened that day and who it felt like he was connecting with more. Then rewriting the next day’s work to push him to whatever we needed the story to be for the next day. So it was a constant amount of rewriting.

The Contending: You also wrote the finale, which is a wrap-up letting Anthony know this was a show, and it’s a lot of the actors seeming to speak from the heart saying what they were feeling for him throughout the show. How is it to write something like that?

Anthony King: We spent a lot of time discussing that because we had asked him to go above and beyond and I was really worried about him thinking that he was saving everyone, and then just immediately go, never mind, it’s fake! Because that’s not in the spirit of the show; it is to celebrate the connections and the way that we are kind to each other. I wanted to speak to that, and also to the larger themes of the season of the show.

Part of the reason we chose a company retreat is that, for a lot of us, the people we work with are the people we’re closest to outside of our closest friends and family. Because we spend so much time with them. A company can say we’re a family here and that can be very true. But it can also be used cynically, to try to get employees to work harder or to take less money. So we wanted to explore both those things, which is why we had our small family business where that is true. Then Triukas is this private equity company that comes in and uses lines like “Triukas family” to that cynical side. So looking to wrap all of those things up in that last episode, and speak to all of those things as we bring Anthony into the truth of what all of this was.

The Contending: In the finale you go over things that went wrong or almost went wrong.. You had the weather problems, and then in that final episode, the window in the car being rolled down was an issue. Was there anything else that became an issue on set that you guys had to hurry to deal with?

Anthony King: Yes, by far the most nerve-wracking was the window being down because it happened in real time with so little chance to fix it. It was our last day and I knew that would have been like the first domino. If that part of the story was screwed up then everything after it was going to be screwed up. So it was really terrifying and that was definitely the biggest. The other ones were small things like we realized that there was a day where the way the sun was out that these cameras that were hidden in trash cans were just lighting up that trash can and you could just fully see a camera. Luckily, Anthony didn’t see it and we were able to move away from it in time. There were things like that where you’re just constantly terrified that something’s gonna go wrong.

The Contending: You were a producer on the show as well. What were the challenges there?

Anthony King: Yeah, I mean, there’s so many things that are so unique to just this show. Just the idea that the majority of the crew is sneaking onto set every morning and then sneaking out at night. And we have a cast who after hours if they are interacting with Anthony are being asked to stay in character, even though there is no script. It’s just a high-wire act from top to bottom and you’re stressed out the whole time. You’re constantly like, okay we’re gonna try to get him to come to this room so that we can do this seminar. Then he goes, I’ll be right back, and starts walking away. And you can’t say, hey, but we need you here for the scene. So everything’s adjusting, you’re trying to figure out where he’s going and why, so you can be prepared both with cameras to film whatever happens, but also so he doesn’t find out that this is all fake.

The Contending: With everyone trying to create that sense of that family and sense of joy, a particular moment I loved was when Stephanie Hodge told Anthony how much she appreciated that he didn’t look at her as being old but as a person. What was the overall feeling for you then with the show, with that kind of message to it?

Anthony King: I wasn’t on season one and the reason I wanted to work on this season was because it was a show where the comedy was coming out of connection and opportunities to show kindness. I feel like so much comedy is insult or cringe comedy. And I like some of that stuff, but I really think it’s almost harder to make characters be nice and still be funny. That felt like a wonderful challenge and, especially with how crazy and negative things are a lot of the time, to create something that is about connection and seeing each other that just felt like a nice thing to be able to do. Ostensibly, we’ve created a false world, we’ve created all these fake characters, but the connections that those actors built with Anthony were very real. We fell in love with him by the end, and we’re not hiding anything in the edit, he really is a good person, who was so curious and willing to connect with all these people. It was really heartwarming.

Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat is streaming now on Prime Video.