Danny Jarabek
Writing a television show is complicated enough, but writing one where the lead actor does not know he is on a television show is something else entirely. Anthony King, Executive Producer and Writer on Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat, has earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series for Episode Seven, “Mergers and Acquisitions,” the penultimate installment of Season Two in which everything the writers built across the entire season comes crashing to a head. The show places an unsuspecting real person, Anthony Norman, inside a fully staged corporate retreat for a family-owned hot sauce company called Rockin’ Grandma’s, surrounded entirely by actors, with a season-long story arc designed to make him care enough to save the company himself. It is, as King puts it, a real high-wire act.
Awards Radar spoke with him about building a world that has to pass the smell test, what they learned about Anthony Norman in real time, and the moment in the finale when King’s stomach dropped out of his body.
Read our full conversation with Writer and Executive Producer Anthony King below.
Congratulations. You’ve been nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series. I have been such a fan of this show through, of course, Jury Duty Season One and into Company Retreat and it’s been so exciting to see people like yourself get recognized for the immense spectacle and production that this show entails.
Anthony King: Thank you so much. It’s a real high wire act, but very, very fun.
I would love to hear about the writers’ room and how a show like this even begins to take shape, even starting with the initial brainstorm.
Anthony King: There are two things happening at once. One is building a world that has to pass the smell test for the person we are going to bring into it, so there is a lot of reality building. We built Rockin’ Grandma’s as a hot sauce company, had to build their history, and literally find a way to put them on Google Maps, just to make everything as real as it could possibly be.
And then we are getting into the characters. We knew our goal was to bring in someone who has no reason to care, just a temp at a company, and ask, “Can we make them care and invest so much that they will go above and beyond and save the whole company at the end of the story?” We did not know if that would work, but everything we built was toward that end, toward building connections and revealing these oddball characters to be real people. As we were building out their storylines and arcs and trying to make them funny and odd but still find ways to connect, we did not know Anthony was going to be our hero when we were writing it. But we were finding ways to make whoever it was feel invested and willing to care. And of course, as we were writing all of that, we were adjusting constantly once we were actually doing it in real time. The actors were remarkable in bringing all of it to life.
You sparked my interest with that idea of reality building, because you not only have to sell it to your hero but to an entire production to make it feel immersive. Where did Rockin’ Grandma’s come from?
Anthony King: There were some big themes we wanted to play with around the idea of being at a company. There is this old adage of treating each other like family, and that can be very cynical. There are corporations that wield that idea to get people to work more than maybe they should for their compensation. So we wanted to speak to that, and we built Rockin’ Grandma’s to be a literal family company, with a hot sauce recipe that came from a family recipe, so it could be as authentically family as possible. Most of these employees have been there a very long time, so there is a real connection between them. To counterpoint that, we bring in a private equity company midseason called Triukas that wields the same language, welcoming Anthony to the Triukas family, but it feels cold and cynical. That was on purpose, to build that contrast between the two companies. A lot of the world building came from that. We also did a lot of research, interviews with small hot sauce companies, figuring out how they build their businesses and what they worry about and care about. And then we were writing backstories and connections between all these characters who had to be able to answer literally any question. In any show you build the world of the characters beyond what you see on screen, but here we had to have actors who, if Anthony just asked where they went for spring break last year, were not stumped by that and could answer in real time. There was an immense amount of backstory developed before we ever got to what was going to happen on camera.
Going into production, did you have multiple routes planned based on certain touch points, or did you see a more streamlined path through?
Anthony King: We were building story arcs that we wanted to tell for all the characters and for the show in general, but we obviously had this wild card of a hero whose reactions we could not predict. So it was less about building tons of different possibilities and more about building ways to connect with whoever that person was going to end up being, and finding tactics and ideas for how to get them to invest. Those tactics adjusted every single day on set because we were learning about Anthony in real time. A lot of rewriting happened as we went. There was also a ton of rehearsal with the actors so that in every situation, they all understood the story beats at every turn, because they could never say they messed up a line and needed to go back. It was less about memorizing dialogue and more about really knowing the beats so that they could adapt in real time to whatever Anthony was doing. Most sets have a lot of downtime. Not this one. You never stop, because you have a person who does not know they are on a set. The actors can never break character. That is an actor’s dream on some level, but it is also exhausting, because they really have to build and sustain this reality. If anyone breaks at any point, the whole show falls apart. It is over. That high-wire act is a thrill, but it is also genuinely nerve-wracking.
Once you knew Anthony was going to be your hero, what specifically about him and his personality helped you in those real-time adjustments?
Anthony King: There was a moment early on that I think about constantly. We had a story in Episode Two where some Doritos were going to go missing and we were going to try to figure out who might have stolen them. The original idea was to convince Anthony to take the fall, since he was a temp and everyone else had to come back the following year. Would he do that for the group? At the end of Episode One, while we were shooting it in real time, there was a proposal that went badly and his boss asked him to lie to the group about why he was leaving. I watched Anthony come back to the group, pull Marjorie who runs the resort aside, and say, “My boss just asked me to lie to everyone. I do not want to lie, but I also do not want to disobey what my boss told me. What should I do?” In that moment I thought, first of all, this person is remarkable. The authenticity he has, and he is not afraid to ask for help. But also in that moment I knew there is no way he is going to lie about the Doritos. Zero chance. So we rewrote it, even though it was happening the next day, to have Dougie Jr. take the fall instead. And if you watch the episode, Dougie Jr. says he will lie, and Anthony immediately says no, no one is lying. He simply would not accept it. Those are the kinds of moments that are really thrilling, because you are learning about a real person and adjusting the story around him. That is unlike anything else on television.
You mentioned Dougie Jr., played by Alex Bonifer, who is just marvelous in that role. Were there any relationships he built with certain cast members that surprised you or went in a direction you did not expect?
Anthony King: Dougie Jr. was always going to be a challenging role because he is kind of an idiot, and a delightful idiot, but if you watch you think this person should not be running this company. And that is exactly what he wants, to run the company. It is such a testament to Alex that he built a real connection with Anthony, because Anthony very easily could have written Dougie off. I think on some level he did think that. But he also understood how much Dougie Jr. wanted to prove himself, and he connected with that. That relatable thing underneath the surface was what we tried to find for every character. Another character that is tough to connect to is Jimmy, who is on a journey of trying to better himself but says a lot of inappropriate things and makes situations awkward. That could have pushed Anthony away at any moment. But we really leaned into his authentic want as a character. He is trying, really trying. So when he screws up, it feels endearing and you want to help him. That is what we tried to find for all of them. They are all oddballs, but there is something at their core that is relatable and that you want to root for.
I have spoken to Alex and Wendy and asked this same question about the climactic moment Anthony stops the merger. I am curious to hear about it from a writer’s perspective.
Anthony King: The entire season is built to arrive at that moment, and we do not know if he is going to do it. If he does not, we do not really have a show. So everything was designed to build toward it. That last day was structured as a real-time farce. We are taking him up a mountain and back down, up again and back down, with big broad comedic elements like a notary who locks his keys in the car, listening to secret information through vents, someone having a reaction from eating too much crab. Big broad comedy, but also high emotion. We are really putting him through the ringer in a farce he does not know he is in, and then building to this moment where we need him to go above and beyond anything you would expect from someone in his position to literally stop the deal from being made. We were on the edge of our seats. Things went wrong with the notary, which you can see in the show, and that was terrifying. There were so many logistics happening in real time. When Dougie runs into that banner and falls down, that for me is the moment where I think: this is it. What will he do? What we never predicted was what he would actually say in that room. We were hoping he would come in and knock the pen out of the hand and say do not sign the deal. But he appealed on such a real, emotional, personal level. When he says “father to father,” my stomach just dropped, because I could not believe how real and personal the connection was that he had built with Doug. That scene almost feels like Aaron Sorkin wrote it. When Wendy says “Are you really going to listen to the intern?” and Anthony just turns to her, that moment was a dream. All of it was a dream.
I have heard the phrase that you couldn’t write what happened, and it is funny to say that to one of the writers.
Anthony King: It is all potential. Everyone else in that room is an actor, so we all have contingencies planned and things they know are supposed to happen. But the way Anthony handled it was so satisfying because it was confirmation: we really pulled this off. The emotional arc of this season that we wanted to build fully worked. And if it worked on Anthony, the hope is it will work on the audience as well.
When I started Season Two I really felt like the ante had been upped in a lot of ways. The farces are bigger, the world building is bigger. Was that part of your mentality going in?
Anthony King: One hundred percent. And one thing that was much more complicated this season is that in Season One, they are all jurors, all strangers to each other. They are each kind of on their own. But because we had Anthony coming into a pre-existing company where everyone has shared backstory, we had to create so many ways for the characters to communicate and build the canon in real time, so that any choice an actor made that was not scripted became scripted. For example, we had already scripted that PJ loved snacks. But the specific idea of PJ’s Snack Attack, him being an influencer, came out of a real conversation with Anthony. When that happened in real time, we said, “Now we are writing that, it is part of the show.” Those things were constantly happening in real time. That made it the most fun and stressful production experience, but very, very fun.
Well, thank you so much, Anthony. I really appreciate some insight on the process. I love the show. Congratulations again on the nomination and the well deserved recognition for you and the whole team involved in this.
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