Workplace shows help get us through even the most miserable of jobs
Australian workers are having a burnout crisis. The average full-time employee in Australia spends 2080 hours a year at the coalface. And according to the latest Microsoft Work Trend Index, we are suffering from a higher level of burnout than workers from other countries. We’re spending more time working and less time leisuring, and are expected to be constantly available because our CCs and BCCs can follow us wherever our phone does.
And when we’re not working, we’re consumed with thoughts of the office. So why the heck after a long day of work, do we want to relax by watching TV shows about work?
I was thinking about this while watching Fisk the other day. Fisk premiered on the ABC in 2021 to great acclaim, and its second season finished at the end of last year. The show follows comedian Kitty Flanagan as Helen Tudor-Fisk, a lawyer who seeks a sea change not in a sexy “meet windswept men at the beach” kind of way, but in a “move from Sydney to a weird and tiny law office in Melbourne” kind of way. It’s bloody funny.
The stakes are often hilariously tiny (as when Helen can’t figure out why everyone in the office thinks a temp called Peggy is so funny, when she doesn’t find her funny at all) and the supporting cast of characters, including Julia Zemiro, Marty Sheargold and the always delightful Aaron Chen, crackle and pop. The humour feels so Australian in a way that you can’t imagine other countries being able to decipher.
But then, last year, a weird thing happened (weirder than Fun Peggy not being funny). Netflix put it on their global platform in August and it suddenly went gangbusters. Fisk cracked the global top 10 during its second week on the streamer. It raced up the charts in the US, Kenya, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Argentina, Canada, Uruguay, Ireland and the UK.
People were talking about it, this ultra-specific comedy filmed in the inner north of Melbourne, which didn’t feature any bodice-ripping, serial killers or a bunch of kids in the 1980s trying to escape the Upside Down.
“Has anyone else discovered this yet?” said someone in an American TV Facebook group I’m in. “Where my ‘Fisk’ heads at?!?” another posted. For months people kept asking what amounted to the same three questions: where did this show come from, how did I not know about it and when can I get more?
Even Flanagan was “absolutely stunned”. “As a natural-born pessimist, I keep waiting for someone to say, ‘I’m sorry, there’s been a terrible mistake,’” she said at the time.
Workplace comedies have existed for eons, since The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the ’70s at least. Workplace dramas too, once TV became less concerned with depicting the domestic (a different sort of workplace).
These dramas were often set in police stations, law offices and crisis-riddled hospitals located in cities with improbably high accident rates. The comedies, like Parks and Recreation, Superstore, Party Down, The IT Crowd, and of course, the much imitated The Office, tended to focus on the absolute, mind-numbing mundanity of work, where you spent so much of your life achieving tasks that mean very little, or the absurdity of how influential workplaces are actually run. (Did you ever think of politics the same after Veep, The Thick of It and Utopia?)
The dramas were either “case of the week” procedurals – think Law and Order, Boston Legal, House – or prestigious programs like The West Wing and Mad Menthat used workplace situations to comment on the current moment without explicitly having to do so.
Perhaps my favourites were the glamorous melodramas like Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal, that amplify and distort workplace drama to the point that you wonder how anyone survives the work day at all.
So, why do we like workplace TV so much? It can be relatable, sure. An opportunity to laugh at re-creations of every horrible team-building exercise you’ve ever been forced to sit through.
I think for both comedy and drama it comes down to the same thing: seeing a cast of disparate and often conflicting personalities tumbling around like atoms, forced to have the same goal or at least endure being in the same place.
There was a bit of a lull in new office dramas after Mad Men ended in 2015, but our fascination with watching people work isn’t going away. You still get cosy workplace sitcoms. Shows like Abbott Elementary on Disney+, which uses a primary school as an excuse to gather an oddball crew of loveable kooks in the same small space, where they can fight, fall in love and try not to lose their jobs in the process. The glamorous workplace melodramas are still being green-lit too, like The Morning Show which posits, “What if all the scandalous rich people on Big Little Lies worked at the same place?”
Increasingly though, TV uses the workplace not just as a setting but as a narrative device to illustrate how a broken system can damage the psyches of the workers themselves.
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In Succession, it tears apart families. In Industry, it eats away at whatever morality you have. There’s no pleasant escape here. High-stress shows like The Bear will make you sweat whether you work in hospitality or not. Who hasn’t been in a pressure cooker situation at work where, like Carmy with his head-spinning, you need to go outside to collect yourself lest you lose it at your colleagues? Likewise, Apple TV’s Severance gives us a dystopian view of the workplace gone wrong. What if your job was so bad that you needed to wipe your brain every time you leave the building? Maybe you wipe it by watching one of these shows.