Work It: These are men. No, really. Photo credit: ABC
We have a winner: ABC’s new cross-dressing “comedy”, Work It, is not only the worst sitcom of 2012 – and we’re only four days in – but it’s also one of the worst sitcoms of all time.
The show, which premiered on Tuesday night to abysmal ratings, centers around two guys’ guys who, facing straitened economic times, do what any self-respecting dude would do: Dress up as women to get jobs as pharmaceuticals reps. Why women? Because there’s a “mancession” on and, as one character says, drug companies want to hire ladies as menfolk doctors are more likely to want to “nail” them. Because only straight men can be doctors, because no one can tell that these “ladies” are actually – gasp! – men, because men have it so tough these days. Right.
The layers of offensive stereotype married to clichéd men-in-dresses gags, has managed to anger just about everyone, from gay, lesbian and transgender rights groups, to women’s rights advocates, to TV critics, to Americans who like comedy. And all that negative publicity couldn’t, it appears, scare up viewers – Tuesday’s episode saw ratings far lower than the also man-centric show, Man-up, it replaced.
But is Work It really all that bad?
Oh, yes. The only question left about this “painfully out-of-touch, er, comedy” is who it offends more, men, who are treated as self-absorbed, disgusting overgrown children, or women, who are uniformly shrill and stupid, declared Aly Semigran at Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch. The two lead actors, Benjamin Koldyke and Amoury Nolasco, are “so painfully, obviously men that even the cast of White Chicks would cry foul”, the jokes are “horrendously outdated, insensitive, sexist, and racist”, and not one character on the show even remotely resembles an actual human.
So bad, you could feel sorry for it? Not really. Said EW reviewer Ken Tucker, “[T]here’s no denying this was one lousy sitcom.” But is the Bosom Buddies remake so bad that you could actually feel sorry for it? Maybe: “The kindest interpretation to give Work It is that its premise is also operating in the real world that surrounds it: That in our poor economy, even good actors have to take what work they can get… I say this without sarcasm: Good luck to the Work It cast.”
It’s offensive, but it’s greatest crime is just being unfunny. “I can barely even explain what an awful, hacky mess Work It was, but I’m going to try. There wasn’t one funny or original joke in the whole half hour,” said Brian Moylan at Gawker. “Work It is just a sad, embarrassing mess. It has used up every joke that is conceivable from this set up… It’s spent. It’s all used up. ABC, do yourself and the world a favor and cancel this thing before it gets any worse. Just kidding. It couldn’t possibly be worse.”
No, really, everyone hated it. MSNBC’s TV blog, The Clicker, put together a compilation of some of the best critical put-downs of this universally panned show: Said TIME, for example, “‘Work It’ is bad dumb, memorably bad dumb, the kind of bad dumb show you will use in years to come as a benchmark for other bad sitcoms.”
A silver lining to this cross-dressing cloud? Sure, said Maureen Ryan at Huffington Post: Work It is so bad it’s giving critics a chance to break out the old thesaurus and starting throwing the “deliciously vicious adjectives”; it may make “gender-switcheroo sitcoms off-limits until someone has a really, really good idea for how to execute one”; the sheer terribleness of the show has united critics and fans of “quality television” alike; and, happily, it’s only the first week of January and we can already stop looking for another worst sitcom of the year. Scrub that off the to-do in 2012 list!
