Re: Dark and Darker
a review of Dilbert and Drew Carey
by The Escaped Inmate

Without work all life goes rotten.  But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.

Until very recently mass media has been loathe to broadcast many images that convey much of what modern work is like.  That's no surprise.  For one thing the media companies themselves are corporate entities that employ large numbers of people, so are their sponsors.  That makes them a bit wary of portraying themselves as anything other than the great big happy family of their spin machines.  Also they didn't think it would sell. They didn't think people would want to watch things about work after coming home from work, so they pitched escapism.  Like any companies, they had to copy what their competition was doing.

A few years ago that started to change ever so.  First came the popularity of Dilbert.  Dilbert made it by the corporate guardians at first for lots of reasons: the funny page of the newspaper allowed Scott Adams, Dilbert's creator, to fly under the radar while he built an audience; Dilbert's criticisms sailed right over the heads of most management types; many people thought it was just about engineers; people dismissed it as pure fantasy since it included talking animals.  Before long, though, Dilbert was a media monster.  Fortunately for the corporate types, Dilbert made many observations that management itself should have made and probably ended up profiting from.  Dilbert let employees vent a bit - something that's obviously needed in most workplaces.  Executives could quote Dilbert and get instant (if shallow and short-lived) credibility with employees.  Adams has often said that each of us do many remarkably stupid things every day.  He's right.  Everyone has had the Dilbert experience and seen the stupidity of others up close(Those blessed with self-awareness and honesty have seen it in themselves more than a couple times.).  There must, though, be plenty of Dilbert's colleagues out there too.  With so many people having seen the nameless pointy-headed boss in action, can any admit they've ever acted that way themselves?

Dilbert was a way for everyone to relate and make some criticisms, small and ineffectual though they might be.  It was the first crack in the wall.  About the same time Dilbert started hitting it big, Drew Carey's TV series started.  It has since become a pretty big hit.  At first the Dilbert crowd mistrusted it, but then it signed on.  Drew Carey is less cartoonish than Dilbert.   The show still has extraordinary features like the dance sequences and some over-the-top characters so it can still be at arms-length from "real life."

Drew Carey's view of the working world is much darker than Dilbert's.  In Dilbert's world incompetence and illogic are the biggest enemies.  Reason saves the day.  No surprise, since Dilbert is an engineer.  In Drew Carey's world malice often joins or even supplants incompetence.  Since it's a sitcom implausible "reset buttons" save the day every time.  Or do they?  Drew still has to go back to a dead end job surrounded by demonstrations of nearly every bad thing people do to each other.  Then he hangs out with his idiot friends, gets drunk, falls asleep, gets up and does it again.  His friends have lives that make Kafka's look like Jerry Seinfeld's.

A few things keep the powers that be from stomping out Drew's unique perspective:  they don't really get the subversiveness of it, since they just see the goofiness; they still don't get how slight an exaggeration it is and it makes lots of money.  The big question is whether the show can keep its edge after having become so popular.  That only time can tell.  As time goes on Mr. Carey and his compatriots are becoming filthy rich themselves.  That may make it a bit harder to poke fun at the rich and to remember what it's like to scramble for a paycheck.

On the brighter side, now that there are so many more media outlets than there ever were before, there's a good shot that even more perceptive slices of life in the working world will get into the mainstream media.  Why who knows, The Corporate Asylum  might even get to prime time some day . . .
 

works cited:

Albert Camus quoted in Work in America  by James O'Toole, et al, Report of a Special Task Force to the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, prepared under the Auspices of the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London England, 1975, pg. xx.
 

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