'LOLwork': Watching It Feels Like Work (With No LOLs)

We've all enjoyed something offered up by the Cheezburger Network at some point, whether we realized it or not. Even if the combination of funny cat pics and grammatically incorrect captions is not your bag, I guarantee that one of your Facebook friends has shared a link from the FAIL blog in the last year that made you snort. For having created or acquired a collection of sites that are silly and pointless, Cheezburger founder Ben Huh has demonstrated impressive business acumen, successfully positioning Cheezburger as the go-to brand for all the dumbest meme-based humour on the internet. After five episodes of LOLwork, the unscripted Bravo series set at the Cheezburger office, though, I don't know...how it happened.

Obviously, there was no way I wasn't going to watch LOLwork. I work on the web as a content creator/entrepreneur; it's my duty to watch if for no other reason than to see how another company functions. Sure, more and more people are transitioning from traditional print media to the web, potentially growing the potential audience pool for this show; and many of the shows Bravo airs seem microtargeted to coastal-dwelling media professionals and literally no one else (see also: Start-Ups: Silicon Valley). EVEN SO, this show's very existence is a mystery.

Basically, LOLwork is an unscripted version of The Office, in that it revolves around a group of co-workers who, each week, must pull together to overcome a challenge. In the pilot, for instance, two-person teams competed to develop a format for a web series; last night, they put on a telethon to raise money for Content Supervisor Will Sharick to pay for his cat Winston's hip surgery. It's just like in the Office episodes where Michael made a Dunder Mifflin commercial, and the one where Michael put on a fun run to raise money for rabies awareness.

A key feature of the premise for The Office, though, is that no workplace could be less dynamic or interesting than a paper company; the humour derives from all the wacky hijinks people can get up to when their jobs aren't fulfilling or important. At Cheezburger, though, the job everyone is engaged in is producing a variety of humour sites: presumably that should inherently be kind of fun? And yet, as portrayed in LOLwork, Cheezburger looks as stultifying as Dunder Mifflin. Crammed together in a too-small bullpen, glaring at each other's outbursts and disruptions, the Cheezburger employees sincerely seem to hate each other and their jobs. Content Editor Paul Gude wraps up the episode in which a group of middle schoolers come to the office for a Career Day by saying that he feels it was instructive for the kids to have spent the time, since it taught them how miserable work can be. Granted, this is what most episodes of The Office are about too, but at least those people occasionally get off funny lines scripted by talented comedy writers and find love with one another, so that it doesn't feel like such a chore for the viewer. Why LOLwork thinks there is entertainment to be wrung from a group of not-especially-clever clinical depressives is unclear to me.

The sad-sack drones are, collectively, a bummer, but Huh is so infuriating that he almost makes the show worth keeping on the DVR to hate-watch. People who work on the internet have heard stories for years about Huh's unethical business practices -- that his sites steal content, and that he relies upon a large pool of poorly compensated freelancers. Naturally, I don't expect a show he executive produces is not going to draw any attention to these rumours, but even so, Huh doesn't come off well. As a boss, he seems capricious and demanding; as he presents the week's phony baloney assignment, he offers little guidance, and most of the feedback he gives his employees is negative.

But Huh's worst moment came in the show's third episode, as staffers participated in the Cheezburger Olympics (yes, just like the Office Olympics on The Office). Moderating a Hangman-type game where contestants had to call out well-known Cheezburger memes. When Emily Huh, Editor in Chief/Ben's wife, called out "I Made You A Cookie But I Eated It," Ben refused to give her the point because he'd written out spaces for "I Maded You A Cookie But I Eated It." Emily argued that she knew the original phrase; Ben threatened to take away a point her teammate Paul had previously won in the game. Emily looked up the original meme; Ben refused to relent despite being shown evidence. Is there anything worse than a boss who can't admit he's wrong?

Ultimately, though, schadenfreude over Huh's personal and professional shortcomings is not enough to keep me watching, and I don't know why anyone else would. Just because many Americans regard their jobs as joyless slogs doesn't mean there's any appeal in spending their leisure time watching the joyless slogs of others.