My Week in TV Part VII Corporate "The Fall"

Corporate (Comedy Central)-“The  Fall”-The popular black comedy closes out a second season without showing any discernible changes from the first and that’s mostly a good thing. Other black comedies like “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and “Shameless” have introduced serialization, but this show has a much simpler formula and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that when it gets the job done. There’s also the fact that the thematic point of the show is that work is an endless purgatory so while mixing things up would  be nice, it’s slightly truer to the show to keep Matt and Jake constant.

This week’s episode, being a season finale, had me going for a while. The episode begins with Christian scaring his employees with an apocalyptic announcement just for kicks (another standard of the show: Christian is one of the most casually horrible people on TV). In the hierarchy of being able to do what you want, Christian has almost sadistic reign with John and Kate enjoying some partial degree of hell-raising privilege. One of the clever things about this show is that although  Matt and Jake are middle management, you rarely see them enjoying the perks of being able to domineer anyone under them (despite the fact that people like Baron and Grace exist). In certain cases where you do see them with an underling, Matt and Jake are often unsuccessful in controlling them.

In any case, the next development in the story is slightly confusing: It’s not exactly the end of the world but Christian decides to begin a marketing campaign which, for extremely tangential reasons, cause Matt, Jake, and Grace to act as if it is the end of the world. At this scale of comedy, it's not worth worrying about.

Jake quits his job and tries to do every Bohemian yuppie idea that fills his head—open up a record company, start a bar with carefully curated music, become a chef—before realizing that there’s a group of roughly identical yuppies with the exact same ideas in their head. The joke of Jake’s lack of originality is a great example of how comedy can be presented visually with a little bit of innovative thinking.

In the interim, Matt seems to have an inverse trajectory to Jake’s unemployment slump riding a magical high. This is another case where presentation- an affirming montage of Matt ascending up the corporate ladder and seeming to enjoy himself for once- makes the difference. 

But the scene stealer as always as Grace who has a list of creepily specific people she wants to sleep with because it’s “the end of the world”(which, again, it isn’t). Technicalities aside, it’s a lot of fun to witness this character, who’s generally been portrayed as asexual, suddenly become the South Asian Wilt Chamberlain.

The disadvantage of an upcoming third season is the lack of room to take many of these characters anywhere else. But as "Seinfeld" and most sitcoms in the 20th century have demonstrated, the status quo can work wonders if the comedic beats are strong enough.