Some of this year’s best television captures a fundamental change in our attitudes to work. The comedy is darker, the drama is more caustic and close-knit office dynamics are losing their sheen, as creators shift their focus from absurdity to alienation.
Unless you work in a family business, your boss is not your mother or father. Your co-workers aren’t your wacky coterie of siblings and cousins. Much has been written about the toxic practice of workplaces branding themselves as families: in the The Atlantic, Joe Pinsker writes that ‘when a business is presented as a family, its workers may feel pressure to pledge an unreasonable degree of loyalty to their employer, putting up with long hours, mistreatment, and the erosion of work-life boundaries, all in the spirit of harmony and a shared purpose.’ It’s a standard capitalist grift disguised as affection—a way of engendering productivity and an erosion of boundaries when one party holds all the cards.
However, the metaphor of work-as-family always seemed eerily fitting to me. The dysfunction of my own family has been mirrored in all my workplaces—long hours with the same people, with the same big egos, forging precious bonds under extreme pressure—all of which created the same absurdities and intimacies from my private life. I’ve sobbed and poured my heart out to co-workers over takeaway lunches, the same way I do with my siblings. I’ve been needled at and belittled by managers whose insults were so specific and personal, it was as if they’d scoured my skin away to expose every tucked-away insecurity; these same managers would at other times take me into their confidence; teaching me things, showing me kindness and guidance, texting me at 11pm to say: I see so much of myself in you.
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This isn’t the way it should be, but it’s the way it’s been for a long time—and it made for great prime-time television.
2000s sitcoms like Scrubs, Ugly Betty, The IT Crowd and the US version of The Office turned the ineptitude of directors, bureaucratic mayhem and workplace bullying into absurdist gold. But these antics were rarely insidious: even blundering managers like The Office’s Michael Scott were cemented as archetypical, out-of-touch father figures.
The metaphor of work-as-family always seemed eerily fitting to me—long hours with the same people, with the same big egos, forging precious bonds under extreme pressure.
Michael Schur’s beloved sitcoms Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine further codified a dysfunctional parent-child relationship between employees and their managers, with the heart of both shows involving the struggle of a gonzo optimist (Leslie Knope in Parks and Jake Peralta in Brooklyn Nine-Nine) against their austere, but fundamentally good-hearted bosses. Leslie Knope’s liberal idealism in local politics gradually wears down libertarian Ron Swanson’s distrust of big government—the series ends with Ron happily becoming the superintendent of a national park, a role he would have once despised, while Leslie is implied to become president. Meanwhile, rookie detective Peralta—known for his unorthodox arrest methods—eventually earns the respect of by-the-book Captain Holt. A running gag in the series involves Peralta mistakenly calling Holt ‘Dad’ (or famously, ‘Captain Dad’), while Holt vacillates between withholding approval and moments of profound emotional support, a decidedly paternal trope. In the series finale, the daddy-son pathos culminates in Holt telling Peralta: ‘If I had had a son and he had turned out like you, I would be very proud of him.’
Workplace dramas of the past two decades were more willing to show the dark side of these entanglements, as seen through House’s prickly, Vicodin-addicted Sherlock Holmes redux Dr Gregory House. Lauren M Amaro outlines how House’s subordinates and co-workers sacrifice their personal relationships and dignity in order to enable both his addiction and position at the hospital—becoming perpetual ‘fixers’ out of a genuine love and respect for him. Meanwhile in Matthew Weiner’s landmark period drama Mad Men (Stan), Peggy Olson constantly manages the many secrets and failings of her mentor Don Draper, even as she is overlooked in his favour due to her gender.
But for all the heady co-dependency here, there is also an undeniable romance to characters like House and Draper, deserving of slavish loyalty due to their brilliance in their respective fields. Even if their relationships were not dignified, there was dignity to the struggle, in the ultimate excellence of their work. In analysing the relationship between Don and Peggy, Patrice M Buzzanell affirms the parent-child TV mould: ‘Don and Peggy’s intimate relationship resembles a father–daughter relationship in which Don serves as a father-figure to Peggy, helping her to navigate both the public and private worlds of Mad Men.’ Eloise Hendy further elaborates on the appeal of Mad Men’s offices as a whole:
While Mad Men ostensibly portrayed the death of the American Dream—depicting less a work-life balance than a work-life bleed—it was also undeniably sexy. Sterling Cooper was, simply, cool: all dark wood and Eames chairs; whiskey decanters and Rothko paintings. For an audience hooked on ‘mid-century modern’ interior design, it couldn’t be anything other than lushly glamorous; a gloss sheen vision of office life before the mass implementation of the cubicle, the hot desk, the Zoom call.
In the last three years, this romantic bubble has popped. The pandemic has created more distance between workers than ever before. The rise of the gig economy, political turmoil, stagnant wages and widespread precarity have forced the public to reassess management relationships and systems of exploitation. And this has been reflected in our stories—in the best shows I’ve watched this year, the typical work–family dynamic still exists, yes, but has also experienced a fundamental change. The comedy is darker, the drama is more caustic and the spaces themselves are losing sheen, transforming into sites of alienation.
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Adam Kay’s 2022 series This Is Going To Hurt (Binge), adapted from Kay’s memoir about working in Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), opens with Adam (Ben Whishaw) passed out in his car, parked outside the hospital he left just a few hours prior. Within the first 10 minutes of the show, he’s snapped awake, spotted a woman going into labour too far from the front doors, single-handedly ushered her into the building via a service elevator and delivered her baby—all while delivering droll quips to the camera, such as: ‘We call this a cord prolapse. Ideally, it would happen in a labour ward, not in a mad lift.’
The rise of the gig economy, political turmoil, stagnant wages and widespread precarity have forced the public to reassess management relationships and systems of exploitation.
As a doctor on the ‘Brats and Twats’ rotation—also known as the obstetrics and gynaecology ward—Adam is whip-smart and eager, constantly elbow deep in guts and operating on less than an hour of sleep. He’s willing to sacrifice time with his boyfriend and any sense of friendship with his co-workers, as he quests for the (eventually) cushy position of Consultant.
Adam’s gung-ho attitude and ambition set him up as a Gregory House or Shaun Murphy (The Good Doctor) type—but the show treats him unsentimentally, especially through the eyes of its deuteragonist, Shruti (Ambika Mod). A trainee doctor still battling her med school exams, Shruti is instantly mocked by Adam for not understanding quick-fire hospital argot. At every turn, the script lingers on the indignities she suffers: a total lack of guidance, dire errors (graphically ripping a baby out too fast!) and racism. After shared traumatic experiences, Adam gradually warms to Shruti, giving her kinder instruction and offering to spend time with her outside work hours. Like the mentee characters before her, she keeps the secret of Adam’s dire mistake: the misdiagnosis of a patient. In another moment of kinship, Adam deliberately misaligns a dolphin tattoo in revenge for the patient’s racism towards Shruti—this is set up as a hilarious gag, but later comes back to bite them both. Shruti’s journey is set up as a noble struggle, as she gradually become more competent, more detached; Adam, meanwhile, comes to terms with the limits of his arrogance. But the devastating closing episodes subvert expectations, showing the human cost of an alienated workplace.
For all their personal failings, the Adam–Shruti relationship is constantly framed within a systemic trap: the NHS is direly underfunded and understaffed, and Adam and Shruti don’t end up forging much of a familial bond, though they come close. They often fail one another and their patients because, more often than not, they’re just too damn tired. This focus on the difficulty of forging relationships, and working effectively, under a structural crush, reflects a current trend in television—even light-hearted Parks & Rec-style sitcoms like Abbott Elementary serve to foreground the critical failings of the American public school system.
Writing on the popularity of a new generation of office shows such as HBO’s Succession and Industry, Hendy states that: ‘The workplace is no longer imagined as a site of absurdity, but one of tragic flaws, grave errors, reversal of fortunes, violence, the overthrow of fathers…the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. This, as Gramsci says, is the time of monsters.’ The shift has been aesthetic too: largely gone are the autumnal colours, nostalgic flourishes, and snugly cluttered cubbies, replaced by sterile blues and impersonal stretches of glass, linoleum and steel.
This coldness is never more evident than in the cinematography of Dan Erickson’s acclaimed series Severance. Situated somewhere in the frozen Midwest, the series depicts a surreal office building whose corridors closely resemble one of Jacques Tati’s modernist mazes, Mad Men’s mid-century modern aesthetic turned sterile and sinister. This is Lumon Industries, a shady biotechnology corporation whose work is so secret, they’ve invented a medical procedure that can literally ‘sever’ their employee’s workplace and after-hours memories. The most disturbing implication of this operation is that the ‘innies’(i. e. the work selves) feel as if they are enslaved in the building, unable to leave and beholden to the choices of their ‘outies’ (for the innie, retirement/quitting is akin to death). Through this speculative scenario, Erickson satirises much of the alienation of corporate life: the gothic doubling of the innie/outie selves demonstrates the worker’s detachment from their own rights and needs, while an infantilising incentive system (rewards include vaguely off-putting things like finger traps, a melon-only buffet and a mysterious ‘waffle party’) renders their work endless and meaningless. Departments are kept apart so workers cannot communicate and organise, while dissenters are psychologically tortured in the ironically titled ‘Break Room.’
In Severance, the family bonding of the main workers is presented as seemingly impossible—but when it happens, it becomes a transformative act of resistance.
Like the many workplace shows before it, Severance’s heart is a mentorship relationship: one between innie manager Mark S and new recruit Helly R. As with This Is Going To Hurt, the needle has shifted—the show presents the extreme difficulty of bonding in modern workplaces and how deeply out of touch we are with one another. Mark, who is implied to have been repeatedly tortured in the Break Room, is now tasked with disciplining and incentivising Helly to work. Mild-mannered and dead-eyed, he picks apart her escape plans and takes her to Lumon’s creepy museum for inspiration, where gigantic wax figures of the company CEOs reside. The CEOs are cast as mythic figures, the founder’s handbook read by the workers as a religious text—it’s the only semblance of art, of meaning found in this place. Initially, that gives characters like Mark and their coworker Irving solace; but in this heightened scenario, Helly would rather maim and hang herself rather than live this nightmarish half-life. Her shocking defiance, along with an antiestablishment self-help book that finds its way into Lumon HQ, are a clarion bell: Mark slowly realises he doesn’t have to replicate the behaviour of his managers and accept the conditions he’s always lived under.
In Severance, the family bonding of the main workers, these scattershot attempts at connection and open communication under an exploitative hierarchy, is presented as seemingly impossible—but when it happens (and it’s easier than companies would have you think) it becomes a transformative act of resistance.
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One of the most moving depictions of the work-family can be found in Christopher Storer’s surprise hit The Bear (Disney+). The slick eight-part series follows a Michelin star-winning chef de cuisine Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), who ditches the fine dining scene to take over his family beef sandwich shop in Chicago, after the suicide of his brother.
Carmy’s pathological desire to transform the shabby The Original Beef of Chicagoland into the next big thing—a manifestation of his grief—is met with hostility from the staff, who are distrustful of his highfalutin methods. What strikes me about the series is its disinterest in Carmy’s genius: its focus is firmly fixed on how a troubled group of cooks become a family through reciprocal moments of trust and communication that they not only have to earn but also maintain. The most significant relationship is between Carmy and his sous-chef Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), a go-getter rookie who had a similarly elite culinary education. Carmy constantly wonders why someone like Sydney ended up at the Original Beef and, after one too many times of him leaving her in the lurch, she vents:
I think this place could be so different to all the other places we’ve been at. But in order for that to be true, we need to run things different. … The reason I’m here, not working somewhere else, or for someone else, is ‘cause I think I could stand out here, I could make a difference here. We could share ideas. I could implement things that make this place better. And I don’t want to be wasting my time working on another line, or tweezing herbs on a dish that I don’t care about, or running brunch, god forbid.
Earlier in the series, we are treated to a flashback of Carmy working on a line in New York, being viciously berated by his boss; in a penultimate episode, during a moment of intense pressure, Carmy does the same to Sydney. My father has been a cook all my life, and we’ve all seen Kitchen Nightmares: there’s an understanding that this is just how kitchens operate, that the verbal abuse and frenzied production line are the necessary ingredients for your delicious plate. But The Bear continues circling back to Sydney’s monologue, to this moment of where both characters hope for something different, something meaningful, something more. Carmy is not characterised as a father figure, but as Sydney’s equal—a brother, in a show about complicated brotherhood. He can learn as much from her as she can from him, and that if he fails her, it will hurt.
A job can often feel like family, often is family, but what that means has become more painful and complex. This year of television has brought new questions to the fore: what is it that we owe each other as managers, workers, and people? What new configurations and shapes can we become, in a world where so much feels set in stone?
