TV Obsessive
Comedy Central’s Corporate
Hawk: Ah, Corporate. We got three seasons of Comedy Central’s devastatingly sharp satire, but I still think that too many slept on this one in its early days. Just like Detroiters last week, I was delighted to find this on Comedy Central and revisit most of the first two seasons in just a couple of days.
Corporate aims to skewer the simultaneously monotonous and cutthroat culture at the upper levels of a corporation, and boy does it hit hard. A lot of workplace comedies make the workplace a backdrop to the personalities and life stories of their main characters. Corporate is a horrifying existential nightmare that’s as hilarious as it is painful. Imagine the first act of Office Space dialed up to 100 with a dollop of surrealism, and you’re getting close to what the show has on offer.
The pilot opens with a severely fatigued Matt (Matt Ingebretson) being confronted by two of his superiors (Anne Dudek and Adam Lustick) over why he BCC’d someone on an email instead of a CC. When owning up to the fact that he made a mistake, he is asked, “Question: why did you make that mistake?” The pair cite the company’s emphasis on “aggressive confrontational criticism…why don’t you like confrontation? Defend your position!” You can almost literally hear Matt’s blood pressure rising during this exchange, and when he actually opens up about how his life fell apart after his philanthropic dreams in college fizzled out, they fall on deaf ears. Matt’s “best work friend” Jake (Jake Weisman) already understands this environment and is prepared to (probably literally) spill blood to get to the top. It helps that Jake is terminally nihilistic: “Death is a retirement package you get for a lifetime full of pain and suffering.”
The cacophonous opening theme is punctuated by grinding guitars, overlays of stock tickers and Shutterstock-in-motion business dealings and employees soullessly mugging for the camera, slaves to their overlords. The final shot of the opener is our central characters engaging in screaming, fist-pumping enthusiasm for their employer as the title card aggressively flickers with red and white strobe effects. I could probably write an entire piece on how amazing this title sequence is. It’s about 20 seconds long but it perfectly encapsulates the absolute prison that is the resignation to a job that you don’t have the energy to escape from, so you are forced to join the cult-like culture until it literally kills you.
I feel like I’m really not selling this show as something that’s actually fun to watch, but in the right mindset, it’s honestly hilarious. Aparna Nancherla, one of the best comedians working today, has a supporting role as a Human Resources contact with an impervious emotional skin who is neither wallowing in despair nor fully consumed by the beast. Lance Reddick is Christian, Hampton DeVille’s psychopathic CEO who boasts some of the funniest and weirdest lines and plot tangents of the entire series. The balance the show strikes between the bleak satire and the more goofy elements makes each one hit harder individually as each pulls the other out of getting into too repetitive a rhythm.
Corporate is unafraid to frequently delve into the surreal: the mental and existential pain of Hampton DeVille’s subordinates consistently manifests itself in weird and vaguely disturbing tangents, wherein the passage of time and even the boundaries of this mortal coil are rendered toothless. S1E7 “The Long Meeting” is a season-best, as the executives are forced to sit through a boardroom so long, the entire ordeal begins to morph into a waking nightmare. Matt is already chronically short on a good night’s rest, and “The Long Meeting” is one of a couple of episodes that find him drifting into weird dreamscapes. Aside from all of that, there’s still a lingering sense of the world of Corporate being the product of a creepy alternate timeline.
Corporate is bizarre, hilarious, and oftentimes extremely dark (the show’s idea of a holiday episode is adorned with Christmas music, but is actually about the corporation commercializing 9/11 as “Remember Day”), but that’s what makes it great. An existential crisis doesn’t get funnier than this.
