The Return of the Sacred Slacker: Television in a Post-Covid America
/The Return of the Sacred Slacker: Television in a Post-Covid America
Martine Foquet, USC
“No one is sitting around...just waiting for the old regime to come back” said Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell in response to questions about America’s economic future.We are in a strange transitional period where there is an understanding that change is on the horizon, but what that change looks like is anybody’s guess. However, there is one area of life that most observers agree has been changed forever by COVID: work.
The near universal condemnation of Kim Kardashian’s comment that “nobody wants to work these days” is a reflection of the quickly changing perception of the role work plays in our lives. It’s not necessarily that her statement was wrong, but that people feel that lacking ambition is justified under the circumstances. Moreover, the pandemic has accelerated the cultural belief that hard work is not what distinguishes the rich from the average person. While the Great Resignation increased wages for many Americans, analysts have found that wage increases are not proportional to the rate of inflation. Inflation has contributed to 64% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, a trend that even affects those making six figures or more. Moreover, as the cost of living rises people are finding American staples like homeownership and debt-free living harder to achieve. As New York Magazine writer Amil Niazi states, “work [isn’t] my identity or my family; it [is] a means to an end.” And the end is not as enticing as it was in the past.
Popular television shows reflect the changing sentiment around work. Fraud stories like Inventing Anna, The Dropout, Tinder Swindler, and Bad Vegan reinforce our belief that the rich are cavalier with money and that the con man is often indistinguishable from the noble class. WeCrash and Super Pumped provide examples of wealthy moguls who have won their brinkmanship with the law, but often use tactics very similar to those of convicted frauds.
White Lotus and Succession present the wealthy as bumbling fools who nonetheless hold significant power over the lives of average Americans. Squid Game serves to highlight the strange perversion the rich have in observing the suffering of others and the near suicidal torture we are willing to endure to reset our financial station in life. Most recently, Apple’s Severance explores the tacit agreement employees make with their employers to bifurcate their lives while toiling on tasks where the output is not fully understood.
However, current television focuses on a work culture that is dying out. COVID forced companies to establish work from home infrastructures and while there is a push for return to offices, many employees now know that they can effectively do the bulk of their work from home and as a result demand more flexibility. Many GenZers began their careers remotely and their blunt attitude towards mental health days, rejection of traditional hierarchical structures, work-life balance, and corporate political action has baffled even the most open-minded Millennials. While hustle culture is still alive and well, hustling is now associated more so with working for yourself as opposed to working for others.
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Some have made guesses about what a post-COVID America may look like. Sean Monahan, co-founder of the now inactive art collective K-HOLE, predicts a rise in “early-aughts indie sleaze” and a return of irony. This may spark the return of the slacker characters of Clerks, Pineapple Express, and Superbad.
But the slackers of the 2020s will likely be depicted with dignity and perhaps even reverence. The Big Lebowski’s The Dude is an example of how a slacker can transcend a purely comedic role. J.M. Tyree and Ben Walters note the film’s “radical indifference to worldly notions of success and masculinity” suggesting the slacker can come to represent the shifting perceptions of work. AMC’s short-lived Lodge 49 is an example of slacker protagonists being used to answer humanity's perpetual search for the meaning of life. HBO Max’s Search Party also effectively takes a cast of slackers with little ambition (“Working feels bad and I don’t ever want to work another day in my entire life”) and uses them as vessels to mock criticisms of the millennial generation.
America’s relationship to the supernatural is also affected by our relationship to work. Kurt Anderson’s book Fantasyland posits that Americans have always been uniquely susceptible to the promises of the occult. The explosive popularity of Rhonda Byrne’s book The Secret and the rise of gurus teaching the laws of attraction in the 2000s demonstrates how the supernatural can infiltrate even secular conceptions of work.
In the 2020s, we are experiencing a rise in the popularity of astrologists. However, instead of telling us to work harder to attract financial success, astrologists provide comfort by giving insights on predetermined personalities and fates, often requiring nothing but vigilance in order to achieve the life we want.
While I don’t see a return of a Miss Cleo figure, I believe television shows, even those rooted in our reality, will more freely integrate mystical elements. FX’s Atlanta and Showtime’s Yellowjackets provide prototypes for how television series can be set in our present world addressing current issues, while incorporating supernatural elements.
Astrology’s popularity may also bring a decline in biographically based media. In an era where Wikipedia pages mimic authorized biographies, the demand for shows like WeCrashed, The Dropout, Super Pumped and Joe v. Carole seems redundant. While some “true story” shows have attained critical acclaim, the general consensus appears to be that we are oversaturated with stories about troubled founders. The reason why biographical series may wane is that we no longer idolize business moguls, politicians, and celebrities the same way we did in the 2010s. Even pop culture staples like Bill Gates have been ravaged by controversy, destroying the belief that there could ever truly be a benevolent billionaire. The scandals of Elizabeth Holmes and Adam Neumann captured the public’s attention because these individuals had been venerated by trusted sources. If the awareness of fraudsters continues to grow and charisma is met with skepticism, there will be less space for people to garner enough attention to warrant a television show.
Other countries provide examples for how work culture may change in America. China has battled the growing tangping or lying flat movement. The lying flat movement was spurred by a social media post from a disenchanted 31 year old man named Luo Huazhong. The post titled “Lying Flat is Justice” embodies the rejection of China’s traditional work ethic and manifests in Chinese millennials rejecting marriage, children rearing, and homeownership aspirations. Participants in the lying flat counterculture work only as much is necessary to afford housing, food, and high priority leisure activities.
Sanhe gods provide a more extreme example of the lying flat ethos. The Sanhe gods are domestic migrants in China who have completely given up on life and live by the motto of work for one day, party for three. For Sanhe gods, vices are consumed to excess, sometimes leading to sudden death.
The trends in China support the prediction that we will see the return of the glorified slacker. But a more sinister question arises in regards to television: how does the audience disentangle the reverence for the slacker with the conduct of television production studios and platforms towards their employees?
Union conflict in cinema is not new, but we are now living in an environment where there is a strong coalition across industries to improve working conditions. In November 2021, UNI Global Union released “Demanding Dignity Behind the Scenes” which collected information from global unions representing 150,000 cinematic crew members and found that crew members regularly work over 50-60 hours a week while struggling to enforce collective bargaining agreements on set.
Last year IATSE, which represents Hollywood’s behind the scene crew members, voted to authorize a call to strike driven by demands for safer working conditions, liveable wages, and on set enforcement of collective bargaining agreements. Despite IATSE reaching an agreement with AMPTP, 50.4% of union members rejected the contract and felt that their demands had not been addressed.
A key reason for the frustration among behind the scene workers is that streaming platforms have taken advantage of their quick assent in popularity. The “New Media” side letter, which was created to address productions of media made for internet distribution, does not provide the same protections available to traditional broadcast productions. Beyond production conflicts, streaming platforms like Netflix have been criticized for mentally straining work environments where some managers report feeling “pressure to fire people or risk looking soft.”
Ultimately, there is no definitive answer for what television will look like. What is clear is that a “vibe shift” is coming and those attached to old dynamics are likely to be left behind.
