Adam Devine, Anders Holm and Blake Anderson the creators, writers and stars of Workaholics.
Adam Devine, Anders Holm and Blake Anderson the creators, writers and stars of Workaholics.
Yesterday I was asked how my holidays were. Having been back in the office for three weeks now I could barely remember. They were good, I think, but damn do they feel an age ago.
That's what office life does to your brain. Eight hours a day staring at the computer screen sitting underneath fluorescent lightbulbs and breathing in recycled air distorts all sense of time and space. The days drag ponderously as they whizz past. I mean, you do realise it's almost February right? Crazy.
Because so many of us spend so much of our lives in one it's not surprising that office comedies are so relatable and popular. The workplace environment is ripe with comedic situations, plenty of characters and can be filled with clashing personalities.
Whether it's the bleak mundanity of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's The Office, the chipper oddballs of Amy Poehler's Parks and Recreation or the frustrated television writer in Rose Matafeo's sketch show Funny Girls, there's much to identify with, poke fun at and laugh along with in the workplace.
Traditionally, office sitcoms follow a character striving to succeed despite the hurdles of absurdity in their way - a hapless colleague, an oblivious boss, a bitter rival... whatever. Workaholics flips this script entirely.
The three leads, Blake, Adam and Ders, are not interested in the slightest about winning the rat race. There's Ders, a dude thoroughly deluded about his cool factor, Adam, a loudmouth full of misguided braggadocio and sensitive stoner Blake. Their life goals don't extend much further than getting through the day, getting wasted and partying hard.
Their work ethic is pretty much the same as everyone's first office job, ie: not very. You can maybe pull that off in your very early 20s but it's not a sound long-term plan.
Adam Devine, Anders Holm and Blake Anderson the creators, writers and stars of Workaholics.
Of course, when the show started on Comedy Central seven years ago their dudebro antics were totally believable. They behaved exactly how you'd expect college dropouts would while working a dead-end telemarketing job. They got high on the roof at lunch, shot Nerf guns at each other and generally got away with as much as they possibly could.
It's made for very funny - if a little uneven - television over the years. Some episodes have had me near tears I've been laughing so hard - season three's Real Time for example where the gang concoct a plan to stay drunk in order to stave off a potentially brutal hangover while also rushing to erase an awful phone message they left their boss when they were drunk out of their heads the night before - while others have been flatly average.
It's a hit or miss kind of show and I think a lot has to do with how juvenile you're feeling at the time. Fortunately, perhaps, that isn't usually a problem for me...
These early episodes can be caught on Duke and streamed on TVNZ OnDemand while its current final season has just started on Comedy Central on Sky.
The first of these final episodes, Trainee's Day, is a good un'. Sick of all the oldies in the office the guys hijack the recruitment process and hire some trendy millennials.
But they quickly find their juvenile, fairly lame pranks - things like dulling the office cutting knife or switching the coffee with flat Dr Pepper - easily outmatched by their young protégée's who see right through their woefully uncool attempts at being "down" and raise the pranking stakes considerably.
By the end of the ep balance is restored but it's set up for what I hope is a loose season arc: the guys confronting their mortality and realising they're getting to old for this.
Their dissing by the cool millennials forced them to accept their advancing years and getting older is a subject Workaholics has briefly touched on before in the brilliantly funny early episode Old Man Ders.
Despite all their clowning the characters do have the odd flash of awareness that life existsts outside the cubicle. Ders has a desire to enter local body politics while Blake openly yearns to settle down.
For now, at the end of episode one anyway, it's all office pranking, getting wasted and attempting to film porn shoots after clocking in each day.
But as office workers around the globe will testify, that's a hard balance to keep up after turning 35.
