![]() ![]() He’s broken down, disillusioned with the system, and finds himself struggling with basic motivation at the beginning of the season. ![]() In Perry Mason, Matthew Rhys continues to excel as the saddest man on TV, picking up where he left off in The Americans (as well as A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood). I operated purely on a “if it’s important, they’ll remind me” point-of-view, and it served me perfectly. Good news: Not only is the second season of Perry Mason very good, you can absolutely skip the first season without issue if you want to. And when I started hearing more and more people talk about how good the show’s new season was, I dove right in. When The Knick showrunners Jack Amiel and Michael Begler came in to run Perry Mason’s second season, I was intrigued. ![]() I watched the first episode, found it overly dark and dour, and wasn’t much interested in an origin story about Perry’s time before his days as a defense lawyer. Showrunners: Jack Amiel and Michael BeglerĬast: Matthew Rhys, Juliet Rylance, Chris Chalkįirst, a quick confession: I skipped the first season of Perry Mason, HBO’s adaptation of the famed literary criminal defense attorney, perhaps best known for the long-running CBS series in the 1950s and 1960s. Jury Duty is available to stream for free with ads on Freevee. And more than that, the final episodes pull back the curtain to explain the unfathomable lengths the production went to go to pull off the trick. Jury Duty tells a real story, follows a real set of characters, and delivers a genuine payoff. Slight spoilers: The judge reaches a verdict in episode 8 that brought me to tears in more ways than one. The pressure of the judicial system is enough to keep the unknowing target focused on serving his civil duty, much to our delight. Eisenberg, Stupnitsky, Szymanski, and their team of on-the-fly writers constantly bring Jury Duty to that edge of zaniness without tipping off Ronald and blowing their cover. As foreperson, it’s up to Ronald to make sure his fellow juror’s “chair pants,” a homemade invention that attaches chair legs to pants, don’t disrupt the trial, and figure out a way for his group’s religious member to have sexual intercourse without breaking his premarital vows (it involves a loophole called “soaking,” which we will not attempt to describe). Across the eight episodes, Ronald winds up sitting on a ludicrous civil trial involving a disgruntled worker at a Goop-like company, sequestering at a hotel with his fellow jury members (all of whom are secretly comedians), and spending an inordinate amount of time with James Marsden, who plays a fame-crazed version of himself. ![]() And by god, the genial gig worker is exactly that. At the center of the series is Ronald Gladden, a non-actor who doesn’t realize he is in a sitcom and just wants to be the best damn juror he can possibly be. The idea of a jury-duty-themed mockumentary might have worked on its own, but the writing duo’s show goes the extra mile to create spontaneity. Who expected the best new sitcom of 2023 to air on Freevee, the free-with-ads streaming service formerly known as IMDbTV that now lives within Amazon Prime Video? Neither did we, but Jury Duty, created by The Office vets Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky and directed by Jake Szymanski ( 7 Days in Hell), is the real deal: hilarious, sweet, and enough of a concept to bring the unexpected with each half-hour episode. Her closing line, said to her gobsmacked lawyer, who simply stands by whilst Columbo reveals the evidence of her guilt, is also one of the best in the entire show: "Thanks Bertie.Cast: Ronald Gladden, James Marsden, Alan Barinholtz This leads Dolores to then murder Harold as well, before Columbo arrests her for both crimes.Īside from the canny tinkering with the show's format, the thing that makes this a fantastic episode is, quite simply, the great Tyne Daly, whose Dolores seems at first to just be Big Fred's ditzy lush of a wife, before transforming into a cunning mastermind after his death, using her drinking as nothing more than a smokescreen to conceal her devious side. Around three quarters of the way through the episode, Harold realizes that Big Fred's own wife, Dolores (Tyne Daly) was driving the gardener's truck that killed her husband, and he then proceeds to blackmail her. Harold tries to remove the bomb, only for it to explode when the McCain family's gardener tries to move Big Fred's Rolls Royce. For the majority of the episode, we follow Greg Evigan's Harold McCain, who has been plotting the demise of his football team-owning uncle, Big Fred (Steve Forrest) with a car bomb before Big Fred is surprisingly mown down in a hit and run accident. ![]()
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