Cops. Lawyers. Doctors. If aliens are monitoring planet Earth from afar via our television, they must be getting a very skewed idea about what most people do for a living. Of course it makes sense that so much of our entertainment focuses on people in live-and-death situations — there’s a lot of drama there, and there can be a lot of comedy there. But there’s also lots of drama and comedy to be found in other kinds of scenarios.
Would your workplace be a good setting for a sitcom or TV drama? Why, or why not? What aspects of your work that most people may not be aware of would contribute to effective and entertaining comedy or drama? If a workplace like yours has been featured in a show, what did they get right… and wrong?
(If you have a suggestion for a QOTD, feel free to email me. Responses to this QOTD sent by email will be ignored; please post your responses here.)
No it wouldn’t! I gotta spend there all day why would I go home and watch a show about it?!?!
Not my current job – there are 2.4 of us, and we all work from home – but working for an ISP would certainly qualify. Not so much of the life and death, but it could certainly work as a comedy along the lines of The Office except that most of the people involved possess actual useful skills, and some even enjoy what they do, rather than being generic office seat-fillers.
Well, I work in a hospital…
Construction engineering is full of comedy…and drama. But definitely comedy. Thing is, the information dump would be HUGE so that people could get it. It would have to be more absurdist than typical sitcom.
We have plenty of drama, too. I’m in tunnelling and every time someone asks me how much they cost to build, I answer “We lose a man a mile.”
It’s not what they were expecting.
My workplace is filled with very smart and very eccentric people, all working under the banner of supporting and promoting psychology. If ever there were a primordial soup of comedy, this is it.
There’s a lot of laughs in an animation studio, but surprisingly little drama (or I’m just good at avoiding it)
I think I mentioned my idea of an animated sketch show based on it though: take a real-life event (The Tim Hortons across the street is closing for renovations). The show is then made up of clips in disparate styles of various gags, sketches, continuing episodes, or music videos in the different styles of the various animators at the studio. They all get linked to tell a general overall story (such as the five stages of grief, followed by the return to normalcy).
I am unemployed. It would at least be topical.
I don’t recall there ever being a show about landscapers. More specifically, Landscape salesmen.
There’s a surprising amount of drama around here. Project deadlines, demanding downtown Chicago clients(We do the flowers in the Michigan Avenue medians, as well as all sorts of businesses downtown).
We constantly remind each other that there is no such thing as a landscape emergency, but try telling that to someone who just HAS to have their flowers done before their multi-million dollar owner shows up for a meeting. Or before whatever random parade or festival is going on. Trust me, these people are dead SERIOUS.
Of course, we all razz each other and make the best of it. It really IS a pretty cool, and fun, job.
Throw in my being an Atheist working at a Christian company, and it might make for decent television. The owner is completely unaware of this, of course, but my eyerolls during the prayer readings at the Christmas party might be amusing.
They should do a dramedy about Substitute teachers.
A primary school where half the teachers are less mature than the children.
More specifically I am a teaching assistant and my teacher and I have a sort of Jeeves and Wooster sort of thing going on.
Some years back when I still worked at the public library a friend decided he’d write a sitcom. Never went anywhere, but there’s still a kernel of an idea in it. You’d be surprised how many storylines – not to mention characters – you could come up with. Think along the lines of Community.
I never imagined it would be, and then I saw The IT Crowd – and you know what? Turns out it’s a pretty good setting, yeah.
Well, there already was a show about my time at the University of Warwick, called A Very Peculiar Practice. I still remember signing up with Doctor Rosemary Something, and then discovering that my registration had been transferred. It was only when I watched the show that I understood why. (My Doctor, by the way, was the one played by David Troughton, not the one played by Peter Davison, who, as far as I recall, actually never existed).
There’s some potential for a sit-com in my current set-up: a Zen Buddhist university in Japan that turns expectations of what a Zen Buddhist university might be on their head. A small department with three foreigners: two normal erudite Americans, and a comedy Brit (me). I’d probably be played by Richard Coyle (though my wife would no doubt push for Ben Whishaw).
Language classrooms have been done before (the execrable Mind Your Language, for example, which I loved as a kid), but this one would add the cultural misunderstandings tropes.
Well as they did a documentary and 2 fictional series about my place of work – I’d have to say yes.
Sorry 2 documentaries…