Making comedy is hard!
A lot of elements go into creating something funny. There are the characters and their motives, the timing, the punch lines, the physicality. All of these things have to fit together like puzzle pieces in order to make one joke — just one — work. Crafting comedy is like making a clock: if you mess up one aspect, the whole thing is just slightly off.
Perhaps the most important element of comedy is having a premise that is actually funny, something writers, directors and performers can dig into and mine for jokes. Without that, it all falls apart.
A funny premise is something that was missing from ABC’s 2012 short-lived “comedy” “series” Work It. I put both the words comedy and series in quotation marks because 1) the show was not funny, not in the slightest and 2) it wasn’t really a series because it ran for a total of two episodes. Two episodes isn’t even a mini-series, it isn’t a limited event. Two episodes is, well, it’s just sad.
So what was Work It about? Let’s take a look at what the marketing geniuses at ABC came up with. Behold, the extended promo for Work It. Make sure to watch the whole thing, not because you’ll find any laughs but because I had to and I won’t be the only one who suffers.
There you have it, folks: ABC’s Work It, a comedy about a couple of dudes dressing up like a couple of ladies in order to secure a couple of jobs. It’s like a modern update of Bosom Buddies with a dash of The Office and tired, desperate banality mixed in for good measure. Work It brought nothing new to the table. It was a hack premise with hack jokes. You can’t imagine anyone involved with the series being excited about it. What was there to be excited about? Half-baked humor that had been done a million times before? Flat characters that proved to be offensive and out of date? Awful costumes that were too over-the-top and ugly even for a show with this premise? There was nothing about Work It that deserved any sort of attention.
It didn’t have to be bad. Yes, the concept behind the show is beyond exhausted after years and years of various men dressing like women but the creators of Work It could have come up with something good, stranger things have happened. Instead, they chose to go for the easiest jokes and write the flattest, most stereotypical characters. Was the show offensive? Sure was, and not just because of the objectionable concept but because it was so painfully unfunny.
ABC premiered Work It in January as a mid-season addition and its cancelation felt like destiny. But the speed of its removal from the schedule was a bit surprising. ABC aired only two episodes of the series before it was canned. The ratings were the official reason for the show’s demise but the truly atrocious reviews certainly didn’t help. The show garnered a 19/100 on Metacritic, IGN gave it zero stars (a first from that site since 1998) and The A.V. Club graded it a big fat F.
A show like this just was never meant to survive. It was a trash project that somehow made it to air but I can’t imagine anyone actually expected the series to go to the distance. I am sure the stars and crew were already looking for other jobs before the pilot even aired.
Two episodes, that’s it. Two episodes before ABC pulled the plug on Work It, though they promised that viewers could watch the rest of the first season on their website. That means that if you really wanted to, you could hop online and watch the unaired episodes including “Surprise Package”, “Breast Awareness Week” and, of course, “Masquerade Balls.”
I’m sure the traffic crashed their site.