I’ve recently watched a spate of television about corporate power. Having survived adventures in corporate life myself, it’s impossible not to deconstruct. There must be a million possible axes for this, but what if we look at How Real The Show Is, and How Much Does It Hate/Love Its World? (Actually I’m writing this because a lot of people are talking about Severance and I have Something to Say but I have to set it up first. As true as I can make this for you, my friends.)
A List Of Shows With One-Word Titles About Big Corporations
- Billions (Realism: low except architecture/great staircase; H/L: loves its simple and testosterone-filled world)–Showtime. Premise: Fund manager Danny Axelrod, lit by his working class rage, chews through Moneyland while pursued, combatted, and secretly admired by Chuck a High WASP District Attorney with father issues.
- Succession (Realism: emotionally resonant; H/L: loves its evil world)–HBO. Premise: Approximately–the Murdoch media empire churns through criminally wealthy family life tossing entire lives into the air with glee.
- Industry (Realism: noticeably higher; H/L: embraces its world ruefully, aware of the damage caused)–HBO. Premise: Follow the lives of new graduates in their first year(s) at high-powered London finance place, in a gritty, nuanced kind of way.
- Severance (Realism: the ceilings are correct? why do unreal shows about corporations focus so much on the buildings? so you have some idea of where you are?); H/L: loathes its largely literary/symbolic world) Apple TV. Premise: A corporation develops a chip that people can have installed in the brain so as to sever their identities allowing them to be one person at work and another at home, without any knowledge by one persona of the other. We suspect that the corporation, no spoilers, is malignant.
I find this all salient because America seems to be at an inflection point in our feelings about capitalism and democracy. How’s THAT for a big claim on a Saturday morning when we thought we were just talking about TV? The American mythology of Business involves either Big Player Heroism, or Corrosive Malignancy of Faceless Institutions. But in my experience, corporations are made up of people. I am not sure we can address the inequities in America today without understanding that any system will offer some opportunities for greedy people to cheat. And that people, for some reason that’s above my pay grade (as we said in the corporate milieu), insist on cheating to get more than they could reasonably be said to need.
To get the point, Severance doesn’t have actual people in it. It makes characters out of concepts. Corporations do not treat people the way the show does, and the way artists and writers (looking at you, Dave Eggars) so often like to pretend is the case. Severance gives us a corporation without a human face, without feeling. Corporations are human cauldrons: full of feeling. Succession and Industry are much more like it.
Do we care? Do we care how artistic America sees corporate life? I don’t know. Maybe America itself is “Severed,” between those of us who have worked in corporations and those who have not. Those who have rarely, rarely tell a broad enough truth about their experience. Nature of the beast. Hard to tell the truth in a cauldron.
This does raise a possibly fun question, what about The Office? Loved by millions? I don’t know. I haven’t seen it, as I cannot stand to watch characters embarrass themselves. If you have an opinion, an insight, we’re all friends here.
Have a wonderful weekend.
I am gradually working up to longer word counts. Tendonitis improves, slowly. Thank you for your expressions of care.
16 Responses
I haven’t watched all of these, but will offer an opinion. Yes, America is severed by those that have had the benefits and issues of working in a corporation and those that have not (healthcare being the biggie here). Severance, the show, is extreme and weird and spot-on in its send-up of corporate life/work. Who hasn’t wondered what some people were like outside of work (although I didn’t have to wonder what I was like!)? The show was a good slow burn that I hope will reach an interesting conclusion. BTW, The Office was too real to be funny sometimes, as it had all the corporate types nailed, primarily the over-confident male.
Emily, you feel like it’s spot-on? How would you feel about elaborating?
Corporate representation on TV is often over dramatized. All geared toward attracting the maximum viewers. That said, corporate life carries all kinds of players. In my opinion, you have to play the game to succeed. I always felt my job was either a career filled with opportunity and rewards or a springboard to something better. Corporate culture comes in many variations; all with their own challenges.
Susan, I agree completely that it’s a game you have to play or you will lose. No standing on the side. I would love to visit 100 corporations over the course of five years, getting a sense of all the cultures, because I’ve really only experienced 3 large companies and they were only what they were.
I am a fan of The Office, both UK original and the US version. From personal experience of working in offices, the UK version is absolutely correct about the strange world of work, how little things become huge, the rivalries, the alliances and is only just a smidge larger than life. At times you cringe, at others you guffaw, usually in recognition. I can’t say I have watched any of the programmes you list and not sure I have access to most of them.
Annie, thank you. One day when I have put my time in an office farther behind me I think I will have to pick up The Office and will enjoy it.
I called it Extreme and Weird and Spot On – which I should explain to mean that parts of the show are those things, not everything. The spot-ons focus on the POV of a lower level employee and include 1)unseen board and higher ups, 2)written “manuals” with value statements that can be manipulated and used to rationalize decisions; and 3)work that is unconnected to other departments and unconnected to an end-product.
Aha! Thank you so much for the clarification, Emily. I totally concur. I should have noted that my perspective is shaped by having been brought into corporate life as a trainee after an MBA and therefore excludes a lot of experiences.
I’ve never worked in the corporate world, so zero experience with the reality.
I love watching Succession because of the family dynamics and the over the top characters. No insights here other than I don’t think I would have fit well into corporate life.
I am guessing you are right, except if they had a large and important art department that had an effect on the bottom line.
I have watched none of these shows, so you can probably skip my opinion, because it is not actually based on Severance or any of these.
But, I mean, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are largely… apparently weirdly disconnected from compassion and other human realities, and run corporations which have issues of soulless-ness (although the humans at those corporations are not entirely soulless).
Friends who worked at Amazon over a decade ago and then gratefully migrated to Google were heavily not a fan of the internal culture; conversely, acquaintances who I would not want to work with [with basic life principles of: if we can take it, we deserve it; misogyny; losers lose and that includes people who have moral principles that stop them from taking as much as they can get] apparently did just fine there.
(And then, I mean, Elon Musk’s “I’ll give the wrong ventilators to hospitals and get credit for Being So Generous and a Pandemic Public Example… while having forced workers to work despite pandemic restrictions” – the “generous donations” that are the equivalent to pennies to us feel more like showing your power and throwing your weight around than like generosity. I know almost nil about the environment at his companies, though; he may or may not have shaped them to match him.)
(and Facebook: any engineer can end up more excited about what they *can* do and the unexpected capabilities of a system and at least temporarily lose sight of whether those things are frankly terrible to do, but the more problematic an organization is, the more likely, frequent, and systematic that sort of thing will be. How can you carry on experiments in inducing depression in people via what you show them on Facebook and *not* have someone say at some point in the process “uh, maybe seeing if we can induce depression in people is a *bad* idea? Can we see if we can *reduce* depression instead? Or gather data from the archives on what sorts of things people did see which was then followed by increased incidence of depression rather than attempting to induce depression?” What kind of environment is it if no one blinks, startled, at what they’re doing, and says something that makes the rest of them wake up – or if it’s not possible to wake them up?)
So that’s what I think: some corporations (or at least some arms of some corporations) both attract people who have reduced moral capabilities and induce additional reductions in moral capabilities via the environment (corporate goals, what is accepted as fine or encouraged by their superiors, what is mocked as idealistic and unreasonable, peer assumptions). They’re still human beings created by God, and therefore I can’t call them totally soulless, but the corporations they beget are soulless and largely without ethical frameworks to guide towards good outcomes and restrict progress in bad directions. (which is not to say that there aren’t people with ethical frameworks working within power in those corporations – some people just Need A Job and that’s what was there, and obviously the Amazon warehouse pickers are different from the higher-ups who make decisions about how to suppress unions and maximize what they get out of their workers as disposable units who will be cast aside when their joints wear out.)(and then there’s the RNC, which is an organization but with almost exclusively malign influence at this point, and demonstrably bad effects on those connected to it or marinated in it?)(and it’s not like Google or any organization/corporation is spotless; but there is a difference between “wow, one bit of this organization somehow retained a fragment of perspective of humanity despite all the pressure and habits” vs. “a few bits of this organization lost perspective of humanity”)
Anyway. American capitalism is deeply messed up and needs some surgery to remove some impulses and some habits. American political lying manipulations needs surgery to remove *it* itself. Democracy needs more light and more oxygen and more good leaders. God help us all.
KC, thank you for the long and articulate comment. You conclude: “American capitalism is deeply messed up and needs some surgery to remove some impulses and some habits.” I agree with the deeply messed up, but I doubt that surgery will ever remove these impulses. I don’t know of a society that’s evolved past these aspects of humanity, although there are definitely places that suffer from them less than we do. Smaller countries for the most part, and my theory is what you allude to, leaders become weirdly alienated from their citizens in large countries. A failure of imagination? I don’t know. I would endorse Elizabeth Warren’s approach and say that American capitalism needs to be MUCH better regulated than it is. As for certain companies attracting more venal people, oh gosh yes. Company culture is real, and the last couple of decades, particularly in tech, have endorsed a mentality that ignores any responsibility for others.
Off-topic but I would love to hear your thoughts on streaming. Frankly, I’m getting a little ticked. I sign up for a particular service only to discover I have rent or buy the better movies. For example, even though I’m an Amazon Prime member, I will have to pay to rent or buy “Belfast” or the amazing “The Outfit”. And this isn’t always the newer movies. No, they want to charge me $3.99 to rent “To Kill a Mockingbird”. Good grief, it was made in 1962 and they still want their pound of flesh!
Gail, I have so many thoughts on the “television” industry these days! They just haven’t sorted out their business models, and the sunk costs of cable are fighting hard again change, and everyone wants to dominate the landscape. I hope it regroups and rationalizes in the not-too-distant future, but it’s like an entire continent reshaping itself.
Meanwhile I just want an app that tracks what I watched on which service LOL!
In case you missed it: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/14/opinion/severance-apple-tv-office.html
Oh my goodness, I’ve never understood why I just cannot watch The Office – but that’s it! That’s it exactly. Thank you for putting this into words for me. It explains also why I can’t bear reality Tv either. I feel like I know myself better for reading this, thank you.
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