BEST OF 2018 - CORPORATE IS NOT TOPICAL, BUT VERY TIMELY

8.  CORPORATE (COMEDY CENTRAL)

You’re never going to find a darker sitcom than this, which is like if you took the absurdist workplace comedy of 30 Rock (or for a deeper cut, the brilliant-but-cancelled Better Off Ted) and set it in Edward Norton’s soul-sucking office from Fight Club. There is of course no shortage of dark comedies on TV these days, not to mention this list. But most are dark in the sense that they basically want to be dramas. Corporate is dark because it is thoroughly and deeply nihilistic, and all its stories and jokes flow from that.

Nihilism is a tricky foundation for comedy, as it could easily lend itself to the haughtiness or stridency of a newly-minted atheist sophomore.  And if the show felt like it had something to prove about this darkness, it would quickly become insufferable.  But it strikes a matter-of-fact tone that treats the fundamental meaninglessness of existence as a bedrock assumption rather than a thesis to be argued, which is a shrewd tonal posture.  It's bracing material, but the show at least respects the audience's intelligence enough not to pretend that it is telling us anything we don't already know about the acute inhumanity of corporate culture.  It knows that we, and its characters, have seen plenty of Fight Clubs and Office Spaces, and we/they still chose to accept the machine instead of raging against it, since we'd "rather be miserable in a one-bedroom apartment than chase my dreams in a studio."  If the show has any truth bombs to drop in regards to this life, it's only that this the "real" world isn't much less full of shit or rewarding than the cubicle, so that sort of calculation is actually distressingly sensible.

Again, this could be completely acidic stuff, but Corporate cuts the darkness with plentiful absurdity that combines with that cold-blooded tone to make the jokes to hit harder and avoids that fatal sense of self-seriousness.   And the combination of silliness and pessimism also makes it weirdly timely for 2018. While the show was presumably in development for several years, the droll, hungover vibe could not have felt more appropriate for a year that basically started from the assumption that God was clearly dead and if anything had ever mattered, it clearly hadn’t for a good long while now.

I’m not making any of this sound very appealing, I know. But it’s such a funny show, and its utter commitment to its cold comic logic becomes oddly charming. I was certain that logic was too offputting to find a wide audience, but I was recently surprised first to see promos indicating that it would return for a second season next month, and then at how much I was actually looking forward to revisiting Hampton Deville. It is an underlit moral wasteland, where the best (like Aparna Nancherla’s acerbic HR rep) lack all conviction and the worst (Lance Reddick’s terrifying CEO and his fawning junior executives) are full of passionate corporate intensity. But it makes me laugh a lot. That’s all I have. That and the folder on my work computer labeled “Porn For When I’m Angry”.


See It For: Premeditated Swan Murder