Freevee will try to sell Jury Duty to the Emmys as a comedy, not a reality show

Last month, Amazon’s Freevee released all eight episodes of the first season of Jury Duty, the irritatingly named streamer’s new hybrid comedy-reality series in which a regular guy (solar contractor Ronald Gladden) was brought onto a fake jury, in a fake court case, with fake people (and also a fake version of James Marsden, played by actual person James Marsden). Working in territory previously explored by programs like Spike’s The Joe Schmo Show, Jury Duty has gotten a lot of heat from its blending of the real and unreal—with Gladden himself garnering lots of praise for his realistic and charming “performance.”

Now, those accolades are threatening to get official, as Freevee has—per Variety—announced that it intends to submit Jury Duty in the scripted comedy category at the Emmys, rather than in any of the categories reserved for reality shows. Which might mean, among other things, that Gladden could get submitted for a comedy performance he literally didn’t know he was giving, which is a pretty wild idea.

There’s precedent here: As Variety notes, Will Arnett’s Netflix series Murderville, which blends written elements with improvised sequences with its celebrity guest detectives, was forced in recent years to submit as a comedy, not a reality program. Still: Everyone involved in that show knew they were making a TV comedy program, which seems like kind of a key distinction when compared to Jury Duty, where Gladden was told he was filming a documentary.

Jury Duty was created by Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, who got their start as writers on The Office; in addition to Gladden and Marsden, the series also starred Kirk Fox, Mekki Leeper, Edy Modica, Ishmel Sahid, David Brown, Cassandra Blair, Maria Russell, Susan Berger, Ross Kimball, Pramode Kumar, Ron Song, and Brandon Loeser as the other members of the jury (and their various alternates).