Trying to wind down after a hard day’s work? Don’t turn on your TV

What is “work”? Work is being asked to arrange numbers on a screen for eight hours a day and never being told why. Work is being pulled in so many different directions that the only relief you feel is from hiding in a room and crying. Work is being so enraged by professional sabotage that you throw a burrito at your co-worker. Work is feeling such pressure to perform that you stay up all night at your computer drinking energy drinks until you have a heart attack in a toilet cubicle.

Wait, is work like that? TV certainly seems to be telling us so.

Seth Rogen’s The Studio depicts Hollywood as a meat grinder that turns even the most idealistic into company men.Credit: Apple TV+

When you consider the most talked about shows of the recent years – Severance, The Pitt, The Bear, Hacks and Industry, for instance – many of them seem to revolve around the idea that the modern workplace is a hellscape.

Hacks paints comedy (and making art) as a pursuit poisoned by money and personal betrayal. The Bear – particularly the most recent season – lets us know that hospitality is a game of Russian roulette, where the talented and kind burn out and the corrupt thrive. Industry tells viewers from its very first episode that working in finance kills your heart metaphorically and, sometimes, quite literally.

It might not look like it, but these two women on Hacks just landed their dream jobs.Credit: Stan

Whether you loved or loathed the second season of Severance, the reason it initially stuck to people’s brains was the dark exploration that a home self and work self could exist at odds with each other; that bringing your personal baggage to work was detrimental to your tasks (even if those tasks were monotonous and nonsensical).

Does severing your home self and work self protect your soul? How much meaning should you find in work? You might argue that when Severance became less concerned with work boundaries and selfhood, and more concerned with goats and innie-outie love triangles, it lost its spiciest subject matter.

The workplace as TV fodder isn’t new, obviously. Mary Tyler Moore getting up to hijinks as a TV producer in the 1970s was probably the first workplace comedy – suddenly, a domestic setting wasn’t the only way to tell stories. Legal and medical procedurals have dominated television for decades, with the Law and Order franchise, ER and Grey’s Anatomy providing season after season of such rhythmic storytelling that audiences found (and still find) comfort in the familiar formula.

Comedy is where workplace stories thrive, though. Shows such as Taxi, News Radio, The Office, Parks and Recreation, Superstore, 30 Rock and Scrubs – just to name a few – showed audiences that the office was just another form of the family home and co-workers were stand-ins for family members: they make you tear your hair out, but you owe them love and loyalty in the end.

Does severing your home self and work self protect your soul? Sarah Bock and Adam Scott in season two of Severance. Credit: Apple TV+

But as attitudes around “work as family” have changed, it feels like these stories have changed, too. If work is your family, isn’t it extra traumatic when that family lets you down?

Maybe it’s a case of art reflecting what we’re all feeling. We know the statistics: the job market is unstable, people are working long hours for less pay, and working yourself to the bone doesn’t mean you’ll end up being able to buy a house. Young workers are “quiet quitting” to deal with their discontent and lack of compensation, emotionally disengaging and doing the bare minimum. Last year, it was reported that only half of Australians felt happy at work (though the happiest generation were Baby Boomers. Make of that what you will, I’m not a soldier in your culture war).

Even in the federal election just gone, issues of working from home and repeals of workers’ rights to disconnect became political footballs. Maybe Mary Tyler Moore being grateful just to have a foot in the door doesn’t resonate with resentful audiences in the way it once did.

The biggest proponent of “work as family”: Steve Carell’s Michael Scott on The Office.Credit: NBC

One of the reasons why medical drama The Pitt seemed to connect with audiences so much was its “unusual authenticity”. Following hospital staff in an overcrowded Pittsburgh emergency room, The Pitt isn’t just a case-of-the-week drama; it’s a screaming alarm that points to ways the healthcare system is failing.

In every episode, the failings are drummed into us: people work overtime because there aren’t enough nurses, healthcare workers are assaulted because there aren’t enough security guards, whole floors of the hospital are closed because of lack of funding due to bad patient satisfaction scores, during mass casualty events the hospital is so low on blood that ER doctors have to donate while operating. Heroic deeds are still taking place, but these doctors are angry. When each episode of The Pitt ends, you aren’t uplifted – you’re shocked that healthcare workers continue to work in these conditions.

Of course, workplace injustice can still be rendered ridiculous. Veep almost too-accurately depicted a world where clueless but ambitious villains run government institutions. (Also see Utopia, not as villainous, but just as clueless.) Apple’s latest comedy The Studio unabashedly depicts Hollywood as a meat grinder that turns even the most idealistic into company men obsessed with profits. Abbott Elementary is sweeter than these sour satires, but its delightfully warm teachers still have to deal with the realities of an underfunded education system.

If you want an escape from the nine to five, TV is no longer the place to find it.

Sinead Stubbins is a writer and editor from Melbourne. Her debut novel, Stinkbug, is out in June.

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