How ‘Jury Duty’ Created a ‘Believable’ Asian Character
The buzzworthy Amazon Prime show does a lot right—but Ken's reliance on stereotypes isn't it
The cast of "Jury Duty."
Courtesy of Amazon
Words by Quin Scott
Something funny happens after you’ve spent too long watching the Amazon Prime comedy series Jury Duty, released last spring. You start to doubt your own movements and innate characteristics, questioning their authenticity. Brushing my teeth with my partner, we both found ourselves giggling: We weren’t just brushing our teeth; we were actors, acting as toothbrushers. Even the smallest actions took on an air of…something.
Jury Duty’s premise has that effect. An artificial trial is created and stocked with actors, all surrounding Ronald Gladden, an unsuspecting civilian who thinks he’s on an actual jury. It’s been compared to The Truman Show, but the viewing experience puts you more in the perspective of the actors than in the Truman/Gladden role. Watching the actors use each moment to build their identities and make themselves known to Gladden, you can’t help but scrutinize your own moves as performative choices.
With a deep ensemble of jurors and plenty of plot to meander through, each character has limited facetime. And in that short time, they have to walk a complicated line—they have to act normally enough to convince Gladden he is in a real trial, while also acting comically enough to entertain the audience at home.
No surprise that the majority of the cast (including Gladden), are white. But I found myself particularly interested in how the characters of color were portrayed. How do the non-white actors portray characters both absurd and believable, that capture an audience’s attention while also ringing true to the white protagonist they are orbiting?
For some characters, particularly Black-presenting jurors Vanessa and Lonnie, this means being relegated to fairly reactionary roles, standing by to shake their heads at the antics of their problematic white jurors. And for the Asian character Ken, it meant fulfilling a variety of common Asian stereotypes.
Ken speaks awkwardly, maddeningly slowly in a way that seems to stem from anxiety and/or discomfort with English. He is a struggling small business owner, exaggeratedly devoted to his family (especially his mom), and is dangerously addicted to gambling. His main scene of the season involves him losing around $2,000 to Gladden in a card game, and then claiming to be bound by duty and family to pay the debt, to Gladden’s dismay (Gladden is an incredibly likable person throughout the show).
Ken is an endearingly doltish brand of the model minority, a sort of emasculated Asian man that we have seen time and again in various media. What makes this particular portrayal unique is that he demonstrates that his stereotypicality is not only meant to entertain, but also to be the kind of Asian that a white person finds authentic. By acting out, he fits into a role. The stereotypical character provides the cues for Gladden (a young white man who references Family Guy) to understand and believe him. How do you make a young white guy believe that the Asian guy next to him is for real? One way, it seems, is to make him an incompetent gambling addict with a speech impediment.
One of the final moments we see Ken, and the one that I think about most, is when he stops being Ken. In the final episode, all is revealed to Gladden—the illusion of the fake trial falls away to show the set, the production team, and the actors that had pretended to be his colleagues and friends. With the cast sitting around him, Ken’s persona falls away and we get the first real glimpse of his actor, Ron Song. Song introduces himself as a real-life college administrator at UC Irvine. His speech pattern unsticks itself, and his body language eases up, relaxing out of Ken.
For those of us hoping for a win for Ken/Song, the moment feels like a mixed bag. While Song is able to assert a fuller, more authentic self, and as his castmates eagerly embrace him, they also express some exasperation with the Ken character. And even though he was a construction, I felt for some reason protective of Ken. Perhaps because while stereotypes are mockable in the abstract, they become less so when they are formed into an actual person.
Perhaps Ken is just a writers room product made to be consumed by a white protagonist, to accommodate a largely white cast, and amuse a largely white audience. And perhaps he would be entirely different if Gladden weren’t white, and he could have been offered a complex character that could stand on its own without leaning on stereotypes.
But perhaps, he is also representative of one’s capacity to take the stereotypes foisted on them and to turn them to toys. Song’s performance demonstrates a sort of inverted code switching—rather than adjusting his affect to be more white, he adjusts to be more stereotypically Asian, othering himself in a way to belong, and finds some standout show moments in the process. That he’s able to reveal his whole self at the end gives him a degree of autonomy and offers more positive implications from what otherwise would be a more flatly problematic character.
Part of the novelty of Jury Duty may be in how it makes explicit what many people, especially people of color, have known all along, whether articulated as covering by scholar Kenji Yoshino, double consciousness by sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, or whatever other term for self-conscious racial performance. Complex histories form the stereotypes that dictate how we move through the world, how we’re seen and see ourselves. The role of Truman on The Truman Show, or the Gladden on Jury Duty, the role of the authentic protagonist, is left to white folks who can simply be themselves, while others are left to the bit parts.
Published on September 27, 2023
Words by Quin Scott
Quin Scott is a writer, painter, and educator in the Pacific Northwest. They like reading, running, and making jokes with their friends.