"Corporate" is a brilliant satire that's frankly all too true
Craig and I just finished watching the second season of Corporate, which recently landed on Crave in Canada. We loved the first season and were both delighted that Season 2 was just as brilliant and biting.
As you can probably figure out from the title, the show is a completely cynical satire of corporate life; it’s all about hating your job and realizing you’re part of an unwinnable system that you can never escape. It’s hilarious.
Corporate follows two guys named Jake and Matt (played by show co-creators Jake Weisman and Matt Ingebretson) who are junior executives at a massive corporation called Hampton DeVille, a company that’s never met a situation it couldn’t exploit or monetize. Around the office, they’re joined by HR rep Grace (the wonderful Aparna Nancherla), higher-level execs John and Kate (Adam Lustick and Anne Dudek), and company CEO Christian DeVille (Lance Reddick, who you might know from The Wire, Fringe, and all sorts of other things).
Each episode focuses on a common situation that arises in office jobs, or just adulthood in general, and basically just detonates nihilistic truthbomb after truthbomb until you’re laughing uncomfortably and wondering what the fuck you’re doing with your life. It’s fantastic.
You get episodes about a long meeting that never ends (which includes a totally useless brainstorm), an unspecified tragedy in which everyone competes to be the most sad and the most empathetic to the victims, or a device that tracks when every employee isn’t at their desk — the last one which includes a great (and depressing) scene in which John and Kate are explaining that they’re just “collecting data.” (CW for the following YouTube clip: it includes two people using “finger guns” to pretend to die by suicide.)
Two lines that I loved but also made me go “ouchhhhh”:
“There’s no way not to waste your life. The best you can do is find something you love, and work so hard and so long at it that it eventually becomes something you mostly complain about.”
“There are seven billion people on Earth. Even if The One exists, you’ll never meet her. The best you can do is arbitrarily choose a partner you share a few interests with and hope their dormant personality flaws can be medicated.”
Definitely worth a watch. In Canada, Corporate is on Crave, and in the U.S., it’s on Comedy Central.
That’s all for me today, gorgeous! Talk to you soon.
Love,
Kat
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