Ethics vs success make for engaging dramas about all immersive workplaces
Workplaces and work lives have made for great television shows that preceded the explosion of OTT content.
Mad Men a show that chronicles changing lifestyles, moral codes and the rise of consumerism with the growth of advertising in the West, has a cult following. Its protagonist, Jon Hamm, is a sexist, judgmental, and unreliable person, but he is also credible. Then there’s The Office a comedy that evolved into a drama with lots of humour over time. This show, about a self-proclaimed world’s best boss, is about quirky employees, the aforementioned erratic boss, and shoddy management at a paper company. Seemingly mundane in setting, The Office grows on the viewer as its employees deal with life’s regular situations even as the boss begins to grudgingly care for his people.OTT platforms require multiple shows and stories. And the workplace has evolved. Jobs that most young people aspire to are heavily dominated by the hydra-headed tech industry, which, with the inclusion of big data and data analytics in every sector, makes for dense, complex contexts. These tech workplaces, also seen to breach rules of privacy and personal space, still become aspirational for many, sometimes requiring employees to push their identities and opinions to the back burner. When you take on a big tech or big pharma or big five jobs, you often become a part of its culture, losing some element of being an individual.Keeping with changing times, stories about workplaces on OTT have evolved to gripping dramas and thrillers that go beyond everyday corporate life. Severance, an Apple TV + original series, breaks through this barrier with a disturbing take on lives at work and at home. Ben Stiller directs this show with bleakness and an ominous feeling, where employees on a basement floor of big pharma-big tech multinationals have to sever their memories of work and personal life entirely. It is discomfiting and intriguing to watch the consequences of this severance procedure. They do so by getting a seemingly benign implant into their brains so that memories and the burden of work are never felt as they look at blinking numbers in an unexplained data sorting job. Severance might be fiction but its setting, that of complete subjugation to a job, asks thought-provoking questions pertaining to work-life balance.Apple TV+ also has The Morning Show an indulgent, visually stunning TV series about the impact of the #MeToo movement on America’s top news anchor. Jennifer Aniston delivers an on the edge, neurotic character on point, in a show that has subtly pointed out the flaws of he said, she said driven ‘cancel’ culture. Every movement has implications, both good and bad. In The Morning Show, the all-consuming nature of television news jobs and the price of success for being on TV is relevant and convincing. While shows about TV folk and the glamour business are fairly common, The Morning Show focuses on the impact of these jobs on diminishing one’s life. Without taking a stand, it has an introspective element where those that gain the most from a culture of silence survive because they preferred not to take notice.Workplaces that demand dropping personal moral codes is the crux of Homecoming on Amazon Prime Video. In the second season of this series, Geist, the big pharma company, takes centre stage. Everyone that works here knows that they might be involved in creating something questionable, but no one is willing to take a stand. Instead, its lead characters are in a race to make the most of opportunities and to manipulate their way to the top. When the drug that makes you ‘forget’ about trauma leaks in the office, its dreadful impact affects the employees. Homecoming is about corporate ethics and big pharma’s opaque practices. It is effective because it leaves you with a sense of foreboding.The financial sector, particularly big banks, have led to informative and entertaining films and documentaries. Inside Job, The Big Short, Margin Call, Too Big to Fail are fabulous to watch. Billions, on Hotstar, takes this a step further, here the game of trading on stock markets, futures, and commodities are the elixir of self-made billionaire trader Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) and lawful district attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti). As the show progresses, sometimes, its verbose dialogue gets a bit too heavy for easy viewing. But it has built an engaging world of the super-rich where ethics and values melt away, and all that matters is winning, even though you don’t know why you need to win anymore. (a sentiment echoed in Succession). Financial markets thrive on loss and gain, so human values don’t always matter. The HBO show Industry (on Hotstar) also shows the desperation of young recruits in this industry dealing with economic recession and the need to get obscenely well-paid banking or financial industry jobs. These young people have no qualms about trading one’s values for success, yet their lives make for intriguing viewing.Legal shows and TV shows about medical professionals have sustained for multiple seasons with engaging drama because these professions often demand 24/7 involvement. The deep dive into cushier, more valued jobs, and what that could mean for one’s personal beliefs and values have inspired writers to write these stories where ethics almost always compete with professional success. That they work so well means they resonate with viewers. And will perhaps inspire more such stories in the fertile ground of all-consuming, work-from-home, digitally connected professional lives.(Views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent those of OTTplay)
(Written by Archita Kashyap, she has tracked cinema, music, and entertainment for a long time. She loves stories in any format and believes that OTT is the next change-maker that will bring the best stories for everyone.)Share