The Emmy nominations for this year, announced July 12, included nods to prestige hits like "Succession" and "The White Lotus." But a more unexpected nomination came for the pseudo-reality TV series "Jury Duty."
And fans are here for it.
“JURY DUTY EMMY NOMINATED COMEDY B------! A deserved Ronald Gladden W!” one user wrote on Twitter.
The show — a semi-scripted, sitcom-esque comedy — features a cast of actors pretending to participate in a legal trial. It premiered in April on Amazon Freevee, a free streaming service owned by the platform.
In the show, a non-actor named Ronald Gladden, comes into court every day thinking he's part of a real jury. As the actors strive to keep up the guise of reality, they also present Gladden with increasingly bizarre scenarios. To cite two examples from the long list of hilarious situations, one juror wore "chair pants" to the trial and another, James Marsden as played by James Marsden, left an extraordinarily large piece of excrement in Gladden's hotel bathroom.
The nomination was met with shock and surprise, especially considering the star of the show was a man who never set out to be an actor.
"Jury Duty nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series at the Emmys OMG Ronald Gladden you’ll always be famous!!" another person tweeted.
“Jury Duty got a comedy series #Emmy nom, so Hollywood isn’t totally broken….,” one person quipped.
The show premiered in April, and Gladden's actions were met with praise from the beginning. While he previously told TODAY.com he prefers to stay off social media, he reacted to the show's nomination on Instagram.
“This is probably the craziest sentence I’ve ever said. I’m a part of a tv show that’s nominated for an Emmy because I answered a Craigslist ad,” Gladden wrote.
Marsden also scored a nomination for outstanding supporting actor in a comedy series. In the show, he plays a fictionalized version of himself, in which the actor is summoned to jury duty and does everything in his influence to try and get out of it — or, at the very least, make sure everyone knows he's famous.
“james marsden jury duty emmy nominee crying how did this happen,” one person tweeted.
"james marsden emmy nomination for Jury Duty is exactly the type of deeply unserious but entirely deserved moves we need for the sake of this man’s career," another Twitter user quipped.
Marsden opened up about what it's like being recognized for playing himself to Variety. He described the role as "certainly a character."
"I had a beautiful, really inspiring platform to dive from with the structure of the scripts. You had to be nimble and be able to shift and adapt to whatever Ronald’s doing," he said. "The industry goes through phases where they’re certainly more risk averse. And sometimes, in those moments, you get to zig when everyone else is zagging and take a big swing. And we took a big swing with this one, and it paid off."
He said the first person he called after hearing about his nomination was Gladden.
"I just wanted to share it all with him and let him know how huge a part he was," he said. "We went into it all not really knowing what to do, nothing felt familiar. But we locked arms through all of it and came out the other side, kind of like a family."
Gladden told TODAY.com back in April that he has no hard feelings about getting “‘Truman Show’-ed” in real life.
“These friendships are everything to me,” he said “These are just amazing people. They’re fun, they’re kind and that’s the one thing that I’m taking away from this.”
In the outstanding comedy category, "Jury Duty" competes against a slew of hits, including last year's winner, "Ted Lasso."
The full category includes:
- "Abbott Elementary"
- "Barry"
- "Jury Duty"
- "Only Murders in the Building"
- "Ted Lasso"
- "The Bear"
- “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”
- "Wednesday"