EVER watched a TV show set in a workplace and thought, ‘Hang on, aren’t they meant to be doing something?’. Here are five where they’d be sacked for poor discipline:
Cheers
For a supposedly thriving Boston bar, Cheers doesn’t serve a lot of customers, and especially not unnamed non-regulars. There’ll be whole fifteen-minute segments where Diane is too busy quoting poetry or bickering with Sam to take a single sodding order, yet weirdly no one complains and flounces off to try a different watering hole.
The Office (US)
Both the UK and US versions of the show do a remarkable job of showcasing humanity’s foibles and the mundanity of a desk job, but productivity must be in the pits. Between Jim’s pranks and will-they-won’t-they romances, at the American branch they can’t have sold more than a few sheets of paper in almost a decade. Their shareholders should have jumped ship and shut them down years ago.
Succession
For the heads of a multi-billion-dollar company, Logan and his kids spend a lot of time threatening each other with florid language and not very much time managing employees or watching PowerPoints. If they want to hold onto their private jets and $600 dollar baseball caps, they should spend less working hours telling each other to f**k off and more formatting Excel spreadsheets.
Scrubs
And you thought the NHS was bad. If you ever had a medical emergency, you’d hate to be checked into the Sacred Heart Hospital. Never mind your bursting appendix, the junior doctor and surgeon are stuck in a musical episode with special guest star Michael J. Fox, and – oh no, you died to teach them a lesson about seizing the day.
Mad Men
Maybe the 1960s really was a golden age when a man could come into work at 9am, be drunk by 11, go for a long lunch with his mistress, come up with one brilliant idea for Heinz Ketchup that sums up the whole emotional thrust of the episode, and then go home. But Christ, if you were a paying client you’d be a bit pissed off, never mind how sexy Jon Hamm is.
