SPOILER ALERT: The following contains spoilers for Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat Episode 8.

The Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat finale is the real show. It’s when Anthony Norman learns that Rockin’ Grandma’s Hot Sauce has been all a Prime Video charade. And Anthony, as an individual, gets a satisfying conclusion. But it’s also true that “Employee Review” pales in comparison to the Jury Duty Season 1 finale “The Verdict.”

It’s not anything that Anthony or anyone else does wrong; this episode just isn’t as cohesive as the Season 1 ending, despite following the same template. “Employee Review” begins with Anthony being brought back to the yurt and actor Jerry Hauck informing him that the entire retreat is actually a TV series. It’s still great to watch the confusion and then the amusement that spreads across Anthony’s face, just like it was for Ronald Gladden in Season 1. Unlike Ronald, Anthony gets to laugh at the fact that he had this thing figured out a long time ago. “I’ve been saying that this whole time!” he blurts out.

After the reveal, Jury Duty then goes into showcasing how the season was made. This time around there’s more footage of the rehearsals, including more stunt rehearsals from the “Dougcathlon” in Episode 5 and one look at how the hidden cameras were set up in what became the Rockin’ Grandma’s offices. Plus, fans learn that the actors didn’t know one another’s real names; even the subtitles refer to them by their character names on occasion. There’s also a little bit of a statistical emphasis on how Season 2 is bigger than Season 1.

However, the Season 2 finale doesn’t feel bigger than the Season 1 closer. That’s primarily because Season 1’s conclusion largely revolved around the whole cast, including Ronald, sitting and talking together. There is some of that in “Employee Review,” but most of the footage is individual interviews with Anthony and select cast members. So Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat loses a lot of that interplay between people, and the community feeling that came with it. It’s still fun to see how everything was made, but everybody is off in their own space.

The one moment that lands just as much as Season 1 is when actor Stephanie Hodge gets emotional telling Anthony that older people are often overlooked, and she felt like he actually saw her. Hodge—who played the irascible Helen Schaffer—has another moment with Anthony near the end in which she tells him that if she had a son, she’d want him to be like Anthony, who responds that her son “would be better than me.” It’s some genuinely heart-warming, tear-inducing stuff, and it would’ve been lovely to see even more of that. Hodge and Rob Lathan are the only two who get to open up a little bit; a lot of the other interviews are more about the process of making the show, and less about the experience.

And in terms of process, it’s surprising that the hypnotist routine and the talent show performances—the two most outrageous bits of the season—don’t really come up. Even when the producers ask Anthony if he has any questions, his questions are pretty surface-level; maybe that’s because his brain is still processing what’s going on, but it’s a head-scratcher that he asks if Marc-Sully Saint-Fleur (who played PJ) is really going to start a YouTube channel but not if anyone actually got hypnotized.

Audience members will leave “Employee Review” having learned a lot about how this unique form of TV gets made. One of the more interesting bits is the reveal that Company Retreat was filmed during the Ramirez Fire back in 2014, and how production dealt with that impacting their bubble world. But the Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat finale feels incomplete since it leans much further into the “making-of” part, when it’s the human part that this whole show has been for. The result is more of a documentary than the end of a journey.

Maybe there will be commentary track re-releases, as there were for Season 1, and some of the unasked questions will get answered. Or maybe for Season 3 (because Jury Duty Season 3 needs to happen), Amazon can put Anthony Norman and Ronald Gladden together for a bonus feature and have them compare notes. But “Employee Review” falls short of the magic that was created in “The Verdict,” because there’s so much more that’s still out there.

Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat is now streaming on Prime Video. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Prime Video.

Article content is (c)2020-2026 Brittany Frederick and may not be excerpted or reproduced without express written permission by the author. Follow me on Twitter at @BFTVTwtr and on Instagram at @BFTVGram. For story pitches, contact me at tvbrittanyf@yahoo.com.