This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
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“Jury Duty,” a strangely heartwarming prank show about a young man who thinks he’s in a documentary about civic service but is actually the only non-actor amid a whole cast of them, seems like it would be hard to top. But, three years later, Amazon might just have made something even better with “Company Retreat.” Starring the lovable Anthony Norman as its “hero,” it suggests that sometimes what we lack in life is not the ability to do good things, but the story in which to make them unfold. (If you don’t want spoilers for “Company Retreat,” don’t read on!)
As a review in the New Yorker points out, influences for the two shows include “Candid Camera,” “The Truman Show,” and the comedic works of Sacha Baron Cohen and Nathan Fielder. The magazine’s television critic takes issue with the shows’ lack of social commentary and generally sunny disposition — but that’s what makes it so great. We don’t need more TV shows to point out the dark underbelly of humanity. We need more stories about everyday people making good decisions. In TV as in life, we need better scripts.
Our cultural scripts used to be fairly simple, and they worked for a majority of the population: Finish your education, get a job, get married, have kids. Retire, take some vacations, snuggle your grandkids.
Millennials, who have always valued wanderlust and self-actualization more than stability, started to rip into those scripts. Generation Z is tearing them up entirely.
Now, even the fundamentals of a person’s existence are up for grabs. You were born a boy, but would you like to be a girl? Maybe you could just be nonbinary. You could get married, but have you thought about polyamory? You could have kids, but you will probably regret them. Better to live in limbo and indecision until your body makes the choice for you. You could try to do something heroic, but it’s hard when all your role models are ripping down posters of Israeli hostages or throwing cans of tomato soup on priceless paintings.
What it means to be a good person, not to mention a hero, is decreasingly obvious to young people. Maybe they think they know what it means, but they confuse posting Instagram infographics and attending protests for real instruments of change. One of the most radical things you can do today is love your neighbor and be an example for your children. Few people have recently had the opportunity to exemplify this as clearly as Anthony Norman.
Norman joins “Company Retreat” believing he’s been hired as a temporary worker to help out at the annual retreat Rockin’ Grandma’s Hot Sauce throws for its employees. The small business is currently being filmed for a documentary, which explains all the cameras. Norman eagerly embraces the role of “Captain Fun,” thrust upon him by the head of HR, who quickly disappears after a proposal gone wrong.
When the activities coordinator at the ranch suggests Norman can leave, he turns her down. He later said in an interview, “Regardless of what happened, I knew I was showing up to do a job and I wanted to do the best that I could. So I really never had the thought to leave.”
Though his coworkers have ostensibly known each other for up to two decades (in reality, the actors have known each other for about a month), Norman quickly becomes their biggest source of comfort and support. He is nothing but encouraging to characters who are designed to invite derision or mockery, such as Dougie, the screw-up son of the company’s CEO, and Claire, who slathers herself in sunscreen until she looks like a snowbank with eyes. “As long as you’re being yourself, then that’s all that matters,” he tells her.
This mirrors the show’s original iteration: One of the best moments in “Jury Duty” comes when the hero Ronald is getting to know Todd, an extremely eccentric and off-putting character who invents and carries with him “chants,” or pants with a built-in chair. Rather than locking his doors at night, Ronald responds by showing Todd “A Bug’s Life,” hoping that he might identify with the movie’s innovative main character.
The casts of both shows seemed genuinely blown away by the kindness of their heroes. After the show’s premise is revealed to Norman, actress Stephanie Hodge, known to him as Helen, tearfully tells him, “As an older person, you get pushed to the side a lot … And you didn’t ever see me that way. You saw me as a person, and not some older lady.”
Much of this is a testament to Amazon’s casting process, which parsed through over 10,000 people to find its hero, a gentle and charming 25-year-old father. And of course, there’s Norman’s own strength of character, which we see through spliced-up snippets of reality TV but also hear about from the actors who spent a week of their lives with him. And then, bringing it all together, there’s the script.
Norman’s mission, though he doesn’t realize it, is to stop the sale of Rockin’ Grandma’s to a faceless conglomerate that secretly intends to sell its farmland and fire its staff. When he overhears the plan, he runs to convince CEO Doug to stop the sale. And while you could chalk his previous kindnesses up to mere peacekeeping (maybe “wear less sunscreen” would have been helpful advice), the show’s climax is genuinely breathtaking.
Storming into the room where Doug is poised to sign away his company, Norman physically blocks the papers with his hands.
“Father to father, I need to talk to you,” he says to Doug. Emotions are high, people are shouting over each other, yet Norman refuses to budge.
“Are you really going to listen to the temp?” sneers the private equity director.
“Are you really going to listen to the temp?” Norman repeats earnestly, adding, “I genuinely have no dog in this fight besides I care about y’all.”
When Doug hears the truth and the deal successfully blows up, Norman walks outside and, seeing the rest of the employees, yells triumphantly, “Let’s go!”
Norman’s decision was his own, but it was only possible through a script that gave him a clear path in the right direction. These are good people whose jobs are on the line. Norman has the chance to save them, and he takes it.
“In that final sequence, when Anthony runs in to stop the deal, I was in awe at what he did,” said Alex Bonifer, who plays Dougie. “I felt gratitude for being one of the few people that was actually physically in the room and got to witness that with my own two eyes. It’s one of the most beautiful moments on television.”
“Company Retreat” is fun and funny and ridiculous, but it also offers a profound reminder that we are each heroes facing constant opportunities to be the good guy, the protagonist, the person you want to root for on TV. Our scripts may seem more mundane, but if we find the right ones, we may also end up with stories worth telling.
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