Apple TV seems to have cornered the market in the best shows that dramatize the working environment.
Severance is kinda SF but it has one main conceit. An organization has a medical procedure that severs people’s working lives from their non-working lives. As you go up to your office floor in the elevator you lose your memories of your outside life. You get them back as you leave, but you forget everything that has happened to you at work.
It’s brilliant.
The work that our heroes engage with in the Macrodata Refinement department appears to be completely pointless. They receive weird “perks” like Music Dance Experiences and Waffles Parties (the latter is far less cosy than the name suggests). The environment of Lumon is banal, absurd, and terrifying. Interdepartmental rivals lead to acts of bloodshed. The company itself seems to be a kind gothic cult. Employees are tortured in the Break Room and try to commit suicide to escape the sense of feeling trapped. Meanwhile the outside seems bleaker still.
While Severance is not a literal representation of the modern workplace, it successfully captures what if feels like. It helps that this is all played straight.
If Severance is The Office rewritten by Philip K Dick then Slow Horses is Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy rewritten by Ricky Gervais. The premise here is that the British Secret Service does not fire its incompetent spies but instead sends them to a badly run office to do pointless tasks until they resign. The office is called Slough House and its inhabitants inmates are called Slow Horses. This office is ruled over by Jackson Lamb - a drunk, corpulent boss who was educated by the same charm school as Malcolm Tucker.
Everyone in Slow Horses is flawed. The slow horses themselves are erratic - with addiction, poor judgment, or (in the case of Roddy Ho) extreme dickishness. But so are their political leaders (the slimy Peter Judd) and spymasters of The Park (who seem more intent on fighting each other than any putative overseas enemy). The character who exhibits the most control is the profoundly out of control Lamb.
While the TV series is fantastic, the books are even better. Mick Herron has equal facility with labyrinthine plots, poetic description, and hilarious dialogue.
Again, most people do not run around shooting Russian diamond thieves during their day to day. But Slow Horses captures the unfairness and danger of working in a highly-politicized organization, the weight of failing to reach your dreams, and the tedium of being stuck working with those who are as flawed as you are.
There are shows that try to explore workplace situations more “realistically”. But if you want the emotional truth of modern work then these two descriptions ring true.
And if that is true, then it’s probably not a good thing for us.