Comedy Central
Jake Weisman and Matt Ingebretson
The third and final season of Comedy Central’s dark satire Corporate premieres tonight. In the age of prestige television, we’re supposed to believe that entertainment can only tackle the world’s weightiest matters through lugubrious Emmy-bait dramas where every frame reeks of money. Corporate is, let’s say, not that show. But it has more to say about how most of us live our lives than any sampling of so-called Serious TV.
Matt Ingebretson and Jake Weisman, the show’s co-creators, play two junior executives at a conglomerate named Hampton DeVille, which holds dominion over just about every market you can think of, from military weaponry to makeup. But its main product, it seems, is misery.
Virtually everyone inside Hampton DeVille, from the low-level drones to the obsequious middle managers and even those at the very top, spends their working lives just routinely being compromised and exploited and pitted against one another. They endure humiliating executive-level meetings where CEO Christian DeVille (The Wire’s brilliant Lance Reddick) berates and undermines them. They subject themselves to sexism, careerism, and backbiting. There’s an inescapable feeling of the characters being trapped, sacrificing control to the corporate perpetual motion machine, whiling away life on Earth in pointless exercises signifying no personal reward.
It’s also very funny.
The Office and countless shows like it have conjured humor by making the workplace a miniature family, and finding relatable experiences in the usual boring-ness of work. But though Ingebretson and Weisman worked dead-end office jobs before Corporate and clearly understand that culture, the show really relies on viewers recognizing, and laughing at, how our system grinds people down. That’s what makes it so radical.
Comedy Central
CEO Christian DeVille, played by Lance Reddick
“More than wanting to make a show that made fun of office stuff, we wanted to make a show that made fun of global capitalism,” said Ingebretson in an interview with the Prospect. “We realized, corporations are the new nations, and there’s no chance of turning the ship around, so I guess we bow down to Amazon.”
In the season’s early episodes, executive teams are inundated with meaningless busy work, from rewriting the final episode of a hit streaming show because the CEO didn’t like it, to spending hours redesigning a corporate logo that everyone knows won’t change, to building a “Lyft with horses” app that exhibits concern with climate change without actually doing anything substantive about it. It’s the kind of deck chair rearrangement that can drive people mad, if they didn’t have bad-mouthing co-workers and 30-minute midday workouts and anti-depressants to get them through the day.
Throughout the show’s three-season run, Ingebretson interviewed employees at large corporations to better understand the details of how those workplaces operate. “A lot make good money but have problems with things their company does and the work environment,” he said. “There’s an acceptance of it among people. And the alternative is what? What if I double down on being anti-capitalist? Do I move to the woods? Do I have to learn to hunt rabbits?”
In other words, fear is the dominant emotion that pervades our workforce: fear of a corporation ruining them on a whim, fear of having to concede values to get ahead. And this exists at the highest rungs of the corporate ladder. This is a very different angle on big business than is normally portrayed on television.
Soulless corporations serve as kind of a rote TV super-villain, often foiled by a ragtag band of justice seekers. But despite being an absurdist comedy, Corporate is more realistic about individual agency. “There are shows like Mr. Robot, where they know what the system is and they fight the system,” Weisman said. “To us, the reality is, the system has you, and you slowly acquiesce to it, and it’s sad. The way that we deal with that is with laughs.”
It’s a formidable task getting people to laugh at their own powerlessness. That it works suggests many of us are wise to the efforts of large corporations to control our waking lives, a subject I mined in tragically less amusing fashion in my new book Monopolized. When stories of the virulence of corporate power start migrating over from white papers and news articles into cultural products, that’s when you know it’s gotten out of control.
One of the reasons you rarely see something this nihilist on television is that media is precisely one of the concentrated industries being satirized, and executives are naturally touchy about seeing their life’s work turned into a soul-sucking exemplar of everything wrong in the world. That it got made as a piece of commercial art is nothing short of amazing. (The only mass-market product I can remember doing anything similar is a forgotten 1985 Judge Reinhold comedy called Head Office.)
And yet, the creators of Corporate are fully aware that they’re implicated in the system they’re critiquing. “We make this for corporations,” said Weisman. “We need their money to achieve what we achieve. Even in creative entertainment, we’re still in this vice grip.” Amusingly, the season premiere opens with a Hampton DeVille web-streaming network (called Hampton DeView) losing out on locking down the rights to host Gilmore Girls to Viacom, parent company of Comedy Central. Even Corporate is a cog of commerce.
The inevitable question is whether or not viewers are supposed to come away with some message about how corporate dominance is twisting our lives. “Luckily, as comedians, this is what you’re allowed to say: ‘Our job is just to ask a question,’” Weisman said. “We’re allowed to give it to smarter people like you to figure out. We really want to make people laugh. But the reality of life in America is really sad. So we’re being political, but not.”
I think he was being a little modest. Raising awareness about corporate power is difficult work, and smuggling it in through a workplace comedy helps that medicine go down smoother, and allows people to think about whether there’s a better way to structure modern life. Policy holds the key to making that reality, but so do social movements. And art can stimulate those movements. That makes what Corporate is doing positively revolutionary.
The pandemic has spotlighted that level of introspection, too. The fact that nobody can go to the office makes watching a show set in one an even more surreal experience. But while you can hope for change, don’t expect it, Weisman says: “The corporation always wins, because now that you’re not in the office, you’re desperate to be back to work. So now you can’t complain about how bad it was.”
