Why Workplace Comedies Remain a Celebrated Genre

Everyone has to work in some way or another, which is why the workplace comedy has been a celebrated genre for decades. Whether it be in a Boston bar or at a paper company in Scranton, comic archetypes translate across all industries — and this season, three new series use their workplace settings to tackle various sitcom storylines and power dynamics in fresh and funny ways.

“We spend most of our time at work, and whether we like it or not, most of us identify ourselves by what we do,” says Justin Spitzer, creator and showrunner of NBC’s American Auto. “That’s one of the first questions when you meet someone: You ask what they do.”

For Spitzer, work is an obvious setting ripe for comedy and conflict. “An office puts a bunch of people together who don’t necessarily like each other,” he says. Following the employees of Payne Motors, a Detroit-based automotive company, the comedy stars Ana Gasteyer as Payne’s new CEO, Katherine Hastings. She’s the first woman to hold the title at Payne, but the former pharma exec has little interest in — or, really, any understanding of — cars.

Spitzer, who created NBC’s Superstore and spent seven seasons as a writer and producer on The Office, was eager to dig into the upper echelons of corporate America after having tackled characters who are lower on the organizational ladder. “We have these images of these evil people who are totally out for themselves,” he says. “It’s fun to imagine what’s behind the walls of some greedy corporation, but these are also humans — how did they get there?”

That blundering humanity is central to American Auto‘s humor. These people aren’t evil, they’re just not particularly thoughtful — or at the very least, they think mostly about themselves. The result is a group of colleagues whose communication barriers prevent them from working well together to get anything done. “They can’t always consider everyone’s wants and needs,” Spitzer says. “They’re the tools of the corporation.”

Showtime’s I Love That for You, co-created by Vanessa Bayer and Jeremy Beiler, follows Bayer’s sweet, awkward Joanna, a young woman who lands her dream job as on-air talent at home shopping network SVN. But the bumbling Joanna, whose isolating experience with childhood leukemia possibly stunted her social skills, struggles to fit into the competitive, fast-paced culture at a network run by a commanding and imposing figure, Patricia (Jenifer Lewis), SVN’s tough CEO.

“Patricia is the queen bee — all of this is life-and-death for her,” says showrunner Jessi Klein. It’s the intimidating Patricia, whose presence terrifies most SVN employees, especially Joanna, who sparks Joanna’s big lie at the end of the pilot: She reveals that her childhood cancer has returned, inspiring Patricia’s plan to monetize viewer sympathy by putting Joanna in better time slots.

This, naturally, creates tension among other SVN employees — particularly Ayden Mayeri’s Beth Ann, who immediately targets Joanna as a rival, and Matt Rogers’ Darcy, Patricia’s assistant. But Molly Shannon’s Jackie, an SVN superstar whom Joanna has idolized since she was a kid, takes Bayer’s character under her wing.

“We wanted to lean into female friendship,” explains Klein, who notes the writers had no interest in creating competition between Joanna and Jackie. “There’s a mentor-mentee situation, but we didn’t want to veer into an All About Eve space. We wanted to see women who really love each other.”

Klein says she also wanted to avoid stereotypes when writing for Darcy. “Matt Rogers talked about the trope of the ‘gay assistant,’ and we wanted to make sure he had his own life, dimensionality and storyline.” The tensions between SVN’s tyrannical boss and her dedicated but long-suffering assistant also provided an intriguing relationship for the writers to explore. “There’s a lot of love there,” Klein says, adding that Patricia and Darcy have a mother-son relationship that, at its core, is similar to Jackie and Joanna’s.

And yet, Patricia is the boss — and she comes first. “We get to boost up the stakes on the silliest things,” Klein says. “Like, there’s so much intention of where to place the Barbecue Beef Boy Grill on set.” For Patricia, the bottom line is what matters most, and her obsession with SVN’s success is contrasted with the tacky and ridiculous products hawked on the network, which range from leatherette pants to tandem Snuggies. “The stakes are impossibly high for her,” adds Klein.

For the characters in Peacock’s Bust Down, the stakes could not be any lower. Co-created by and starring Sam Jay, Langston Kerman, Jak Knight and Chris Redd, the comedy follows four friends working dead-end jobs at Diamondback Palace, a casino in Gary, Indiana. The group often gathers in the dimly lit casino break room, where they commiserate about their lives.

“All of us are stand-ups and have had the pleasure — ‘pleasure’ is the wrong word, we have had the obligation of performing in casinos,” says Kerman. “Very quickly you find out there’s a completely separate casino for the staff. We thought that was an interesting, untapped space to explore, not the glitz and glamour and the loud machines, but the truly dank back hallways, where the people are treated like losers and given meal tickets so that they can eat the scraps that are left behind by the buffets.”

Kerman explains that the show was spawned by the foursome’s own real-life friendships, forged by the connections they made within the comedy circuit. “We have a ton of ‘co-workers’ in comedy, but there is a reason that we all gravitate toward each other in this space,” he says, adding that their onscreen personas likely bonded first over their proximity at work — even if, outside that venue, they might have not come together as a group. “These four found each other and connected on a type of chaotic energy with each other.”

Kerman admits that while the show takes place at work, it’s simply a setting for the characters to connect. “Our workplace comedy is a bit of a red herring, in that we’re not actually talking about the casino most of the time. It really is just a setup for us to be able to have bigger conversations inside this space,” says Kerman. Those conversations spring out of scenarios that might happen at work — in the pilot, for example, the group decides how to handle a handsy manager (Dan Bakkedahl) who gropes one of the men — but more often than not, it’s their lives outside work that spark the hilariously philosophical debates that take place on the show.

“We didn’t want to find ourselves becoming redundant, to fall into bits like the diversity day episode, or the sexual harassment training,” Kerman says, specifically calling out The Office as having already perfected a comic approach to those topics. “We don’t want to rely on the workplace — our characters are solving problems, and if they do it at work, so be it.”

This story first appeared in the June 8 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.