Constant Content Consumer: Corporate vs. The Office
FIRST TAKE: CORPORATE vs. THE OFFICE, brought to you by Constant Content Consumer
It’s a battle of the depressing, closely confined cubicle workplace office lifestyle, in these two banal addictive television shows. One, synonymous with North American lifestyle, and known by about 90% of the human population, and rewatched by yours truly at least once every two weeks. The other is a dark horse, new, and recently developed by the Comedy Channel. Its season two kicks off this week, and quite frankly, I binged all season one of Corporate last week and was disturbed by how good it was.
It takes a special brand of absolutely painfully dry humor to make me let out of a wheeze, and this is your best bet coming straight out the gates, especially if you were an Office fan. If you like your shows dark, macabre, depressing, glib, and full of dark sarcastic banter that really plays off the fact that going to work can be one of the most soul sucking acts this side of the equator, then this REALLY IS THE SHOW FOR YOU. (This is coming from a person that has not set foot in a cube in 3-odd months.) Hampton DeVille (yes - generous in your face wordplay), is the setting for Matt, Jake, and their HR pal Grace - Aparna Nancherla who I was genuinely glad to see - to have their souls sucked out inch by inch every day by their corporate overlords, some who may be even stranger than they are.
Daily issues range from having to fire someone, to an extreme corporate retreat, with the real treat being a casual Friday that gets taken too far. This show starts as a slow burner, but keep the wick going. One of the complaints with The Office was that it made the sheer reality of having to work in such close quarters with … Stanley’s and Angela’s appear much glossier and tolerable than it actually was. That it glossed over the reality of being in a real office, and did not show its dark side, especially what would have really happened had an enterprise that prided itself on being “limitless paper in a paperless world” been left in the hands of someone with the mental aptitude of Michael Scott. In Corporate, you get the opposite of gloss. You get a real life evil corporation. Hampton DeVille’s slogan is literally “We Don’t Make Anything. We Make Everything”, which is fitting for 2019’s vibe, when you have political leaders holding governments hostage for walls, and filling the bellies of Division I athletes with hamberders.
