Not quite as "down to earth" but I'm also pretty eager to see how Avenue 5's second season goes. Space cruise around the solar system goes sideways. Not as clearly Office Space inspired, but still a Great Snub style show.
If you like comedies in space, Space Force on Netflix is also great. Add one more vote for Avenue 5, suggested above, for “tears in the eyes” laughter.
It is. I had a subscription and used a Roku Ultra. However, I cancelled my subscription after every 4k stream buffered even on a gigabit connection. I watch 4k UHD content on every other service through the Roku without issue. So your mileage may vary.
You can watch in the browser on any device but they don't make it easy. I had to set up an account then separately connect that to my iTunes account. There may have been something else - I can't remember. It felt very cumbersome, but I'm sure would be buttery if you were inside the garden.
I binged a few decent shows then cancelled before my 1 week trial was up. It's cheaper than most but has very little content (and the worst "search" function you've ever seen - maybe these are related).
I’m really not seeing any connection to office space beyond… toxic workplace culture… and I mean that’s kind of a thing in a lot of movies, so I’m really not sure why they bothered to draw the connection to Office Space at all.
Does look interesting though. The use of a camera focus shifting looks to be stylistically interesting and a good way to follow along with the characters mental mode switching.
I’m kind of hoping this is just a 1 season “long movie” and we get a nicely wrapped up story, because I’m struggling to see this concept really managing more than a season and a half before it feels like they would just dragging it out.
It really doesn't sound like Office Space at all. Maybe more like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind crossed with Vanilla Sky and the classic sci-fi novel Dayworld (That future world of 7 people each living one day with the rest in suspended animation, but the main character lives all 7 days...)
I am guessing the author was lead to this thought because near the end of the trailer is this Office Space esque quote: "what is it we actually do here?" (similar to "What would you say ya do here?" by Bob Slydell)
Also, in Office Space, Initech is bureaucratic and top heavy with management and push over employees that seem to accept the mistreatment until the last straw: management hires consultants to downsize the company. That decision starts a chain of events that eventually causes Milton to burn down the company and retire to the tropics with the stolen money. In Severance, I am guessing there will be a similar existential crisis for the business which arises from management smashing one moral barrier too many in the course of trying to achieve greater profitability.
> so I’m really not sure why they bothered to draw the connection to Office Space at all
Because the body of the article mentions The Office and the headline writer doesn't know the difference? (Office Space isn't mentioned in the body at all.)
Do they really? I expect most people on HN to know it, but I’m not so sure about the general population. It’s one of my favourite movies and I often found myself referencing it in office settings, but had to stop because nobody got them, not even once. Most people hadn’t heard of it, and the few who had seen it didn’t like it.
I think Mike Judge is an absolute genius, but none of his movies have performed well commercially. Maybe they lack mass appeal, most people simply never experience toxic work environments, or they do, but fail to recognise it as such. Or the movies were just under-marketed. Whatever the cause, these things aren’t exactly household names.
HN is full of "nerds" and nerds (edit: stereotypically) love Sci-Fi. It's also full of conversations about work/office-related topics. So, Sci-Fi + Office Space being topical here makes sense in a very generalized way. At least IMO.
I had the privilege of working there for a summer (as an intern at Lucent in 1999).
That was my first office job and between that and occasional childhood visits to my father’s workplace - a giant Bank of Montreal compound in suburban Toronto (https://goo.gl/maps/XFmPDMM5qFgQc4ie9) I just assumed that all offices were grandiose concrete and glass structures with massive sweeping vistas.
How disappointed I was by most of my subsequent corporate office experiences…
Meanwhile the Holmdel complex reopened to the public as Bell Works and is worth a visit if you’re in the area!
That was the first thing I noticed, too. Super cool. I’ve never been there in person, but the people and projects that arose from that building make it a semi-mystical place for me.
This was probably inspired more by Philip K. Dick's Paycheck than Office Space. In Paycheck, the protagonist agrees to work on a secret project for two years, after which his memory will be erased.
PKD is a gold mine for heavily modified stories for the screen. His imagination, themes, sci-fi concepts and world building are all fantastic, but he falls way short on characters, dialogue and plot.
Since you bring up LeGuin here I guess I will respond to the canard that Dick does not do characters well, in 'Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown' LeGuin argued that Dick had one of the only interesting characters in all of Science Fiction, that being Nobusuke Tagomi from The Man in The High Castle, the other being D-503 from Zamyatin's We (IIRC) of course it has been nearly 4 decades since I read the essay, and I have a hard time finding an ebook version of The Language Of The Night (which is where I encountered the essay) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Language_of_the_Night that I can pay for.
Been at least four decades (four and a half?) since I read We, but I can't recall a single character from it that had more life than a cardboard cut-out. (A bit like Brave New World in that respect.)
It's interesting to see how they change his kind of old-timey story titles into cool modern ones, eg "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" -> "Total Recall".
There's a 2003 movie version of Paycheck with Ben Affleck, Uma Thurman, Aaron Eckhart, Paul Giamatti, and like 4 other people you'll probably recognize. I watched it when it popped up on Amazon Prime last year. Seems like it's not reviewed very highly but I enjoyed it going in with no expectations and not really knowing what it was about.
I remember watching it and I thought it fell apart in the second half. I really cannot remember how it ends, just that I didn’t like it. The concept of erasing your memory after you complete a job stuck with me, and was probably the most remarkable part of the movie.
Knowing PKD, it probably ends with the whole story being a "flash forward" caused by the protagonist looking through the device that sees into the future and then causing the actions that set up the beginning of the story.
A society seeped in commodified self-critique renders impotent any critique of real substance.
That's what's so intriguing about the current political economy. It has effectively packaged up critiques of itself and folded them into the spectacle. Through this lens Severance may be a harbinger of future work critique films. Given the state of labor relations it's easy to imagine an appetite for films that give viewers the cathartic release of work tension they hunger for. In the context of the first statement, it's also easy to see the dangers in this pattern of behavior.
Very well put, actively integrating the self-critique part is one of the most important things that allowed the current capitalist system to hold its top place (and even to thrive, at some points). The socialist system also tried to integrate the self-critique part ("auto-critică" it was called in Romanian) but failed to do that, hence why the external actors managed to take hold of the "critique of the socialism" discourse.
Back to the self critique of capitalism, I see punk as a prime example of that, it's what I think allowed capitalism to navigate through the turbulent (from a socio-economic point of view) late '70s - early '80s as well as it did. Grunge, on a smaller scale, did the same thing for the Western capitalism of the early '90s, shows like "Black Mirror" did that for the creeping surveillance capitalism of the mid 2010s (we now say "it's just like in a Black Mirror episode", without taking any concrete steps to mitigate the surveillance capitalism creeping in on us).
Not me, but another friend of mine who's also a veteran told me the worst thing about working at a FAANG is that everyone there seems to assume that company's work as their entire personal identity. For reasons that should be obvious ... for a veteran that's kinda hard to do.
Like a lot of these shows this scooped up a large crop of the New York film production workers for many months. I know a bunch of people that worked on it, including my roommate. Funny seeing it on the front page of HN.
I’m likely in the minority here, but I am grumpy enough to completely ignore what look like otherwise entertaining shows when they’re released with the artificial scarcity model. Waiting a week for each episode was required by technological necessity in the days of broadcast TV, but on a streaming platform it just feels like the provider is giving me the finger. “I could give you all the episodes now, because they’re all completed and waiting for me to press this button, here, but I won’t. Why? Well, a part of it is because I’m afraid that you’ll cancel if you exhaust all our content, and I want to use psychological tricks to make you stick around due to an fear of missing out, but really, if I’m honest, it’s just because I like messing with people and I enjoy their displeasure, doubly so when I cause it.”
> Waiting a week for each episode was required by technological necessity in the days of broadcast TV, but on a streaming platform it just feels like the provider is giving me the finger.
Some viewers (and I suspect most creators) prefer a serialized release over season dumps, and there are definite pros to it from a social/conversational perspective.
Even Netflix is doing this to help create more interest for titles. For example, the 9 episodes of Arcane were released in three, 3-episode "acts".
On the bright side, you can still binge at season's end if you prefer that experience. You can even wait until the show has ended, since the time between season releases must seem especially cruel to you.
Airing 1 or 2 episodes a week gives maximum opportunity for a show to be successful, esp if it's a smaller show that doesn't have a built in audience (ie. if it's not a Marvel/Disney show or returning seasons of successful shows). Airing weekly means that there is an ongoing conversation around your show (if it's any good) and each media outlet is potentially writing about your show n times as opposed to writing about your show 1 time reviewing the entire thing, that results in more chances for the audience finding your show. The cancelling the service thing is at best a secondary concern. Moreover creators of many show prefer that their show be consumed on a week to week basis as opposed to binged in 1 sitting with little opportunity for the audience to reflect on it.
HBO has mastered that art of "1 episode a week to maximize the audience and buzz of what appears to be a niche show" even on their streaming service and as a result have found unconventional hits like Euphoria, The White Lotus, Succession, The Leftovers which would otherwise have been lost in the glut of peak tv abyss if they were just dropped in one night.
i watch only one episode per day, but i like to watch several shows in parallel. even if they come out all at once, i get to see an episode of each show only about once a week.
i discuss most of the shows i watch with my friends. when they come out weekly, then we have a discussion about the new episode every week. if they come out at once, then not much discussion happens.
so yes, weekly releases are definitely more engaging.
More dystopian stories to distract us from the real dystopia swallowing us - dwindling health care , 16 hr waits in the emergency room, rising copays while administrators whose work consists of emails and making short sighted decisions continue to take home fat paychecks
Don't forget about the false sense of security science fiction gives us about our civilizations ability to survive calamity, or spread beyond earth. And also the false sense of power super-spy fiction gives us over government security forces (and likewise a false sense of how gov sec forces function). I think both have a real distorting effect on our intuitions about the world.
Following Severance (which will be out in February) Apple TV+ will also release an eight episode series called "WeCrashed" based upon the WeWork saga in March [1].
And if you haven't seen it, there is also Mythic Quest (seasons 1 and 2) that is an Apple TV+ comedy series based in the offices of a game studio.
Also don't forget The Morning Show which is an Apple TV+ drama based in the offices of a fictional breakfast TV show.
So no matter what type of dysfunctional workplace you may enjoy, Apple will have you covered.
Don't worry there's plenty of streaming originals on Apple TV+ catering for people who don't work in an office too.
Such as Mr. Corman about a school teacher who used to work in a classroom but due to COVID is working from home.
Or Acapulco a comedy series about a twenty-something cabana boy who works at the hottest resort in Acapulco during the heady days of the 80s.
And for people who prefer a side-hustle, there's Physical which tells the story of a housewife that starts running aerobics classes in her spare time while successfully launching an accompanying home video lifestyle startup.
Don’t forget For All Mankind, an engineering workplace drama based in Houston, and Ted Lasso, which centres around hijinks in the back office of an English football club.
Those marvellous marketers at Apple sometimes hit it out of the park and sometimes trip over themselves when it comes to naming. For their media services it's unfortunately the latter.
Here's the straightforward guide to everything named Apple TV:
Apple TV – the separate hardware box that runs tvOS, connects to your TV and enables you to view streaming apps developed specifically for this platform on your TV
Apple TV app - an application that runs on the Apple TV hardware box, iOS, macOS and third party TV platforms (Google TV, WebOS, Tizen)
Apple TV+ - the Apple streaming service that provides access to Apple Original TV and Movies that is accessible through the Apple TV app on all supported platforms
Apple TV Channels – third party streaming services (such as Paramount+) that can be subscribed via the Apple TV app whereby the subscription management and streaming data is handled by Apple and not the third party steaming service
Also Foundation, where people are told not to work on Earth anymore and are promptly exiled to the edge of the galaxy. Quite a good take on the Isaac Asimov story to be honest.
I like the show but yeah, it's a bit like ST Dicovery's Burnham (raised by Vulcans no less) crying 6 out of 7 episodes. Sometimes I feel like I'm watching Grey's Anatomy in Space.
Yeah, I think characters like Spock and Picard draw in a special kind of people that identify with these hero's. That is nice. But these people (me) feel no connection with the "all my emotions are on the outside" characters that are now in these shows.
When Picard (or even Spock) shows emotion, it's deep and meaningful. Spock raises an eyebrow, I know this is really something! Picard yells: "The line must be drawn here!", you can see he lost rationality. In Discovery I see tears whipping around the screen for reasons I can't even remember.
I love that women are getting bigger roles, but I'd love to see highly rational women, also with little outside but deep emotions. Idk, I just don't really like it this way.
To be fair Spock (and to a lesser extent Picard, though Data also served this role) was an island of rationality for more emotional characters to play against (Saru often plays something of a similar role on Discovery.)
> I love that women are getting bigger roles, but I'd love to see highly rational women, also with little outside but deep emotions.
If Rebecca Romijn’s Number One on Strange New Worlds isn't very much this, I will be very disappointed.
There's also Ted Lassso which is one of the most feel-good series I've seen this year. And it fits the "workplace comedy" description as well (and no, despite it looking like it's about soccer... it's not about soccer).
They should make one about what it's like to work, eat and sleep in a giant dystopian electronics factory located in a futuristic totalitarian state...
Office Space is interesting, it’s one of these movies to which I see references all the times while I have never run into someone in real life who actually saw it or even heard of it. The other one being This is Spinal Tap.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadOne of the funniest shows I've seen in a while, and a welcome laugh at the onset of the pandemic. Been waiting anxiously for the second season!
I binged a few decent shows then cancelled before my 1 week trial was up. It's cheaper than most but has very little content (and the worst "search" function you've ever seen - maybe these are related).
Does look interesting though. The use of a camera focus shifting looks to be stylistically interesting and a good way to follow along with the characters mental mode switching.
I’m kind of hoping this is just a 1 season “long movie” and we get a nicely wrapped up story, because I’m struggling to see this concept really managing more than a season and a half before it feels like they would just dragging it out.
Also, in Office Space, Initech is bureaucratic and top heavy with management and push over employees that seem to accept the mistreatment until the last straw: management hires consultants to downsize the company. That decision starts a chain of events that eventually causes Milton to burn down the company and retire to the tropics with the stolen money. In Severance, I am guessing there will be a similar existential crisis for the business which arises from management smashing one moral barrier too many in the course of trying to achieve greater profitability.
The author of the article (assuming, as is usually the case, they aren't also the author of the headline) doesn't mention Office Space at all.
Because the body of the article mentions The Office and the headline writer doesn't know the difference? (Office Space isn't mentioned in the body at all.)
Do they really? I expect most people on HN to know it, but I’m not so sure about the general population. It’s one of my favourite movies and I often found myself referencing it in office settings, but had to stop because nobody got them, not even once. Most people hadn’t heard of it, and the few who had seen it didn’t like it.
I think Mike Judge is an absolute genius, but none of his movies have performed well commercially. Maybe they lack mass appeal, most people simply never experience toxic work environments, or they do, but fail to recognise it as such. Or the movies were just under-marketed. Whatever the cause, these things aren’t exactly household names.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEQP4VVuyrY
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs_Holmdel_Complex
That was my first office job and between that and occasional childhood visits to my father’s workplace - a giant Bank of Montreal compound in suburban Toronto (https://goo.gl/maps/XFmPDMM5qFgQc4ie9) I just assumed that all offices were grandiose concrete and glass structures with massive sweeping vistas.
How disappointed I was by most of my subsequent corporate office experiences…
Meanwhile the Holmdel complex reopened to the public as Bell Works and is worth a visit if you’re in the area!
Like most sci-fi writers, to be honest.
on edit: grammar, moving text
It may be a buggered memory, but I don't recall seeing a movie about reverse engineering often.
It's like someone said... what's the worst thing about working at a FAANG?, and dialed it up to 11.
That's what's so intriguing about the current political economy. It has effectively packaged up critiques of itself and folded them into the spectacle. Through this lens Severance may be a harbinger of future work critique films. Given the state of labor relations it's easy to imagine an appetite for films that give viewers the cathartic release of work tension they hunger for. In the context of the first statement, it's also easy to see the dangers in this pattern of behavior.
Back to the self critique of capitalism, I see punk as a prime example of that, it's what I think allowed capitalism to navigate through the turbulent (from a socio-economic point of view) late '70s - early '80s as well as it did. Grunge, on a smaller scale, did the same thing for the Western capitalism of the early '90s, shows like "Black Mirror" did that for the creeping surveillance capitalism of the mid 2010s (we now say "it's just like in a Black Mirror episode", without taking any concrete steps to mitigate the surveillance capitalism creeping in on us).
Not me, but another friend of mine who's also a veteran told me the worst thing about working at a FAANG is that everyone there seems to assume that company's work as their entire personal identity. For reasons that should be obvious ... for a veteran that's kinda hard to do.
Some viewers (and I suspect most creators) prefer a serialized release over season dumps, and there are definite pros to it from a social/conversational perspective.
Even Netflix is doing this to help create more interest for titles. For example, the 9 episodes of Arcane were released in three, 3-episode "acts".
On the bright side, you can still binge at season's end if you prefer that experience. You can even wait until the show has ended, since the time between season releases must seem especially cruel to you.
HBO has mastered that art of "1 episode a week to maximize the audience and buzz of what appears to be a niche show" even on their streaming service and as a result have found unconventional hits like Euphoria, The White Lotus, Succession, The Leftovers which would otherwise have been lost in the glut of peak tv abyss if they were just dropped in one night.
i discuss most of the shows i watch with my friends. when they come out weekly, then we have a discussion about the new episode every week. if they come out at once, then not much discussion happens.
so yes, weekly releases are definitely more engaging.
Distract from -- or remind of / allude to?
And if you haven't seen it, there is also Mythic Quest (seasons 1 and 2) that is an Apple TV+ comedy series based in the offices of a game studio.
Also don't forget The Morning Show which is an Apple TV+ drama based in the offices of a fictional breakfast TV show.
So no matter what type of dysfunctional workplace you may enjoy, Apple will have you covered.
[1] https://www.apple.com/tv-pr/news/2022/01/academy-award-winne...
[1] https://truthout.org/articles/apple-employee-blows-whistle-o...
Such as Mr. Corman about a school teacher who used to work in a classroom but due to COVID is working from home.
Or Acapulco a comedy series about a twenty-something cabana boy who works at the hottest resort in Acapulco during the heady days of the 80s.
And for people who prefer a side-hustle, there's Physical which tells the story of a housewife that starts running aerobics classes in her spare time while successfully launching an accompanying home video lifestyle startup.
It also has the best motion graphics integrations of social media I’ve seen. It breaks new ground in the way House of Cards did with texting.
The Apple Original sci-fi series, Invasion, is terrible. I can’t believe they renewed it for a second season.
Here's the straightforward guide to everything named Apple TV:
Apple TV – the separate hardware box that runs tvOS, connects to your TV and enables you to view streaming apps developed specifically for this platform on your TV
Apple TV app - an application that runs on the Apple TV hardware box, iOS, macOS and third party TV platforms (Google TV, WebOS, Tizen)
Apple TV+ - the Apple streaming service that provides access to Apple Original TV and Movies that is accessible through the Apple TV app on all supported platforms
Apple TV Channels – third party streaming services (such as Paramount+) that can be subscribed via the Apple TV app whereby the subscription management and streaming data is handled by Apple and not the third party steaming service
So simple!
When Picard (or even Spock) shows emotion, it's deep and meaningful. Spock raises an eyebrow, I know this is really something! Picard yells: "The line must be drawn here!", you can see he lost rationality. In Discovery I see tears whipping around the screen for reasons I can't even remember.
I love that women are getting bigger roles, but I'd love to see highly rational women, also with little outside but deep emotions. Idk, I just don't really like it this way.
> I love that women are getting bigger roles, but I'd love to see highly rational women, also with little outside but deep emotions.
If Rebecca Romijn’s Number One on Strange New Worlds isn't very much this, I will be very disappointed.
TIL, looking forward to it! I sort of gave up on Star Wars, but still can't get enough of ST.
Cinematically gorgeous but that's about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Planetes_episodes
...but they probably won't. :P
It’s a good movie, you should watch it.
I suppose cultural touchstones have varying levels of awareness. Everyone I know has seen it but there are obviously some who have not.
Because the downsides seem pretty obvious to me...