Review – Work It

Work It – ABC – 8:30/7:30pm Tuesday – USA

It seems appropriate that the first review of the year is for a sitcom that is sure to be the worst show of the year. Before it even aired on ABC Work It had been receiving unbelievably negative press for months. The premise of this stupendously daft sitcom is that there are no more jobs for men in this world because women are taking over, so two manly men have to resort to dressing as women in order to find work. The basic premise is so head-smackingly ridiculous that you wonder why anybody would have agreed to a second meeting with these creators let alone put money towards creating an actual episode of television.

Work It stars Ben Koldyke and Amaury Nolasco as Lee and Angel two men who are both unemployed and both have names that could belong to a woman. They also are two of the least feminine looking male actors anybody could have found to play these roles. Work It is nothing but a laundry list of problems but the most obvious one is that when Koldyke and Nolasco dress up as women they somehow manage to look more like men than before they donned wigs and dresses. The biggest problem with Work It is that the show is incredibly insulting to nearly everybody. It’s insulting to women, it’s insulting to transgender people, it’s insulting to men, it’s insulting to people who enjoy comedy, it’s insulting to people who like television – it can’t be stressed enough how amazingly misguided this entire series is. Koldyke and Nolasco obviously needed the work because they’ve guaranteed that the rest of their careers will be spent with the title ‘Work It’ popping up alongside their name in the most negative fashion possible.

The premise that there is some kind of “man-cession” where men are unemployed because women are taking over the world is so painfully ironic coming from a show where most of the people employed to make it are men. It stars two men, it was created by two men, it’s directed by men, most of the writers are men, it’s on a network run by a man, the music was composed by a man, even the best boy is a man. The shows flimsy excuse to make a bunch of dated jokes about men wearing dresses doesn’t even make any sense unless you imagine Work It exists in a sci-fi universe where suddenly guys can’t find jobs because of their distinct lack of a vagina. Seriously, the reason they have to dress as women to work for the sales department of a drug company is because the people buying the medicine want to screw the women selling it.

Work It lacks even the barest bones of internal logic. Nothing that happens in this pilot makes any sense. For some reason Lee leaves the house in a suit and returns home in a suit so that his wife doesn’t suspect he’s dressing up as a woman but somehow finds somewhere to put on a dress, adjust his wig and do his makeup. We don’t get shown how he does any of this – he’s like Superman’s awful cross-dressing cousin. Even stupider is when Angel and Lee talk to each other in the office they use their normal voices EVEN THOUGH THEIR CO-WORKERS ARE STANDING JUST A FEW FEET AWAY. This is an utterly bamboozling show. Even the choice of pop songs is off – each song is strangely out of date as if Work It has been sitting around since My Humps was released in 2005. There is not a single redeemable thing about this atrocious television program. Actually, that’s not true; the one good thing about Work It is that TV for the rest of the year can only get better.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Ugly