The premise is simple. A film crew is making a documentary about what it’s like to serve on a jury. The participants will preside over a trial of workplace negligence, giving viewers an inside look at their experiences reaching a verdict. Except there’s no documentary. The premise is fake, and everyone involved except our unwitting hero, Ronald Gladden, is an actor. Filmed both with documentary footage and on cameras carefully concealed around the “set,” Jury Duty blurs the line between documentary, sitcom, reality TV, and Truman Show–esque drama in a way that still leaves the audience with some suspension of disbelief. At times, we are drawn in to the point where we forget that this isn’t a sitcom, only for the illusion to shatter moments later as Ronald brings us back to reality. Today, we’re being fed increasingly simplified narratives about an increasingly complex world—a world post-pandemic, post-Trump, and with a conflict on the European continent that no one predicted. What Jury Duty captures so neatly is our collective apathy. —Julian von Nehammer