Your office, as a comedy
Corporate raids the workplace for laughs.
Warning: If you’re reading this at work, please put away all sharp instruments.
Comedy Central’s Corporate is hardly The Office lite. It’s more like an office that’s very, very dark.
The 10-episode workplace comedy (Wednesday, 10 ET/PT) follows office drones Matt and Jake (Matt Ingebretson and Jake Weisman, who created the show with director Pat Bishop) at the rapacious Hampton DeVille maker-of-everything conglomerate.
Ingebretson, who plays a disoriented, dreamy junior-executive-in-training straining to achieve an identity, says Corporate departs from other workplace comedies in its tone.
“There is no wacky boss, and the good-spirited nature of other shows is a little lacking in ours,” he says. “We wanted to make a darker comedy.”
Corporate is more in tune with Mike Judge’s 1999 cult classic Office Space, although the creators say it’s even closer to Judge’s 2006 film Idiocracy, which finds its main character in a future, dumbed-down society.
At Hampton DeVille, headed by corporate marauder Christian DeVille (Lance Reddick), Matt and his nihilist, cynical deskmate, Jake, are continually trying to get by — and around — midlevel executives Kate (Anne Dudek) and John (Adam Lustick), who suck up to Christian as they terrorize subordinates.
Getting Reddick, known for dramatic roles in The Wire and Fringe, was a coup, Weisman says. “If you give dramatic actors really silly jokes, there’s nothing better to watch.”
Reddick loves playing a guy who’s “hyper-competitive, got to be the best and loves to wheel and deal.” And he’s not sure Christian is an exaggeration.
Corporate plays with the routines of office life, such as executives pawning off firing duties on subordinates. That somehow turns into a daylong sugar high as Matt, Jake and the doomed employee target 19 office ceremonies featuring cakes. In another episode, drow- sy Matt tries to catch a few winks in his car and in a bathroom stall.
“That’s based on real life. I used to go nap in the parking garage at lunch,” says Ingebretson, who juggled numerous office gigs in Los Angeles while trying to establish an entertainment career. “We start from a very small, relatable thing, like I’m tired at work and need to nap, but then we blow it out to where at the end he’s talking to a ghost in a dream.” (And making out with her.)
If Corporate at times sounds like a how-to manual for unsatisfied employees — Ingebretson recommends a neck pillow for a car nap — that’s OK.
The office is just a jumping-off point for larger targets, as Corporate comments on Internet hysteria — an insen- sitive hurricane-related tweet bothers people more than the actual hurricane — and the branding and monetizing of anti-establishment activism.
“We have banal, mundane things set in the office, but we also would like to be talking about bigger issues,” he says, referencing episodes that deal with arms sales and pain-pill addiction.
The dehumanization of work life is reflected in the opening credits, which show Hampton DeVille workers sporting manic, aggressive smiles and marching forward as a team in a visual cliché familiar to anyone who has seen a corporate-branding commercial.
“I spent a couple of years as a TV editor,” Bishop says. “Going through stockfootage libraries, I would see all these hyper-creepy shots of people in offices turning to the camera like robots with murder inside their brains.”
Or, as Ingebretson puts it, “It feels like everything is burning down and we’re expected to show up every day with a smile and dress nicely and pretend like none of that (chaos) is happening so we can focus on this social-media campaign.”
“Most of the comments we’ve gotten are, ‘This is too close to my actual life.’ ” Matt Ingebretson