Mysterious Workplaces

[Noodle Lizard]

Isn't Hal's job in Malcolm in the Middle a bit ambiguous? It's just "an office job" that a suburban lower-middle class family guy would have, unimportant enough for his higher-ups not to even notice that he'd been taking every Friday off for a number of years.

[Maurice Yeatman]

A mysterious apartment rather than a mysterious workplace (unless you count Seinfeld writing at home), but I have to put this somewhere.

[Sebastian Cobb]

It's not even got anywhere for him to sleep.

[Ignatius_S]

Only When I Laugh. A hospital ward in which three men, who show no signs of ill health, get to dick around in dressing gowns for three series.

Four series. Derrick Branche, who played Gupta, was only in three though (and was a definite loss in the final series).

Although Archie was a hypochondriac and in the opening episode has just been readmitted (but does have his appendix removed accidentally in the old bed switcheroo snarfu ) it's not entirely accurate about them displaying no signs of ill-health.

Norman is admitted with abdominal pains and in an early episode is in acute agony but refuses to be operated on, running the of death, thanks to Figgis.

Figgis complains a lot about how bad he feels, but has had exploratory surgery resulting 35 stitches (cue, him asking 'Do you want to see something horrible?') so there might be something to his complaints.

[Mister Six]

*Nightingales

Never heard of this, but I just looked it up and it sounds fantastic.

[Ignatius_S]

Chandler in the early series of Coffee Friends. It had something to do with numbers and computers. Then they made him an ad-man because that's (sarcastic Chandler voice) much cooler than being a transponster. Ross's job was a bit vague too, till they made him a university lecturer.

(I suppose the alternative is when they portray an actual job in a way that the person never does any actual work. Did Larry Hagman ever do any astronauting in I Dream of Jeannie? Not sure Chandler did any work either, though. No idea what Family Guy actually does in the toy factory or brewery; at least Homer has a job title, although I'd imagine an actual safety inspector would inspect things.)

Yes - most of the series.

In the first episode, he's in space and which sets up how he finds Jennie's bottle in the first place. Throughout the show, there's a lot about his work at NASA and his going into space again sets up conflict with Jennie.

[Ignatius_S]

Same sorta deal with Boomhauer in King of the Hill, though I don't recall exactly how rubbish the show had gotten by the final season.

That's probably because the series wasn't average, let alone rubbish, by that point.

A reasonable argument could be made that it was at a stage where it would be better to end it sooner, rather than later before it went into a decline but it was still very good - and in marked contrast to other animated shows, I would say - and continued to do well in terms of ratings.

Also, there have been good reasons cited why people have found that the last 2-3 seasons saw an improvement; in particular, because the show was very focused again on the smaller bits of life, which was a big reason why people liked it in the first place (and something that Greg Judge brought to the table). Although it could be also argued that the same beats were being repeated again (and this is one reason why I feel it was getting a good placed to end it), there's top-notch stuff and to my mind, something like the Four Wave Intersection, a Boomhauser-heavy episode in the penultimate season is as good as anything they did.

Around the midpoint of the show, there was significant increase of unrealistic wackiness, which was ramped up in season six, leading the showrunners, Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, either being sacked or jumping before they were pushed with Greg Daniels temporarily taking the reins and  number of episodes being significantly rewritten. Personally, I enjoy the show at this point (a lot) and the wacky shenanigans hadn't come at the cost of pushing everything else to the backburner, but the direction after that was an improvement that helped the show to eventually sign off strongly.

[Theoretical Dentist]

Dinnerladies is set in a workplace canteen, but you don't hear much about what the larger workplace is, and I don't think anything outside the canteen is ever shown. It's mentioned a few times that it's a factory but I don't think they ever say what the factory makes. The non-canteen-worker characters have jobs that would exist in any workplace large enough (like Celia Imrie as the human resources manager) or mostly look more like they work in an office than on the factory floor (which makes sense if the factory has offices on site, but there's not much sign of the factory side).

[The Mollusk]

Nice one for clarifying @Ignatius_S ! I did have in mind that it hadn't turned sour and merely beginning to comfortably wind down.

[neveragain]

Dinnerladies ... The non-canteen-worker characters have jobs that would exist in any workplace large enough (like Celia Imrie as the human resources manager) or mostly look more like they work in an office than on the factory floor (which makes sense if the factory has offices on site, but there's not much sign of the factory side).

Bernard Wrigley is dressed in factory-ish overalls.

[Utter Shit]

Dinnerladies is set in a workplace canteen, but you don't hear much about what the larger workplace is, and I don't think anything outside the canteen is ever shown. It's mentioned a few times that it's a factory but I don't think they ever say what the factory makes. The non-canteen-worker characters have jobs that would exist in any workplace large enough (like Celia Imrie as the human resources manager) or mostly look more like they work in an office than on the factory floor (which makes sense if the factory has offices on site, but there's not much sign of the factory side).

Because of the title, it never occurred to me that it would be anywhere other than a school. I haven't watched much of it though so that might be disproven very quickly.

[gilbertharding]

Doh, of course!

I like the way they did that, in the tradition of the Ministry of Administrative Affairs from Yes Minister and the Department of General Assistance from the Men at the Ministry.

I'm absolutely certain that I wrote a post making this exact point - but I obviously didn't... MY post also mentioned the Circumlocution Office from Little Dorrit.

I wonder if there are any more, between Charles Dickens and Wilfrid Hyde-White

[gilbertharding]

Dinnerladies is set in a workplace canteen, but you don't hear much about what the larger workplace is, and I don't think anything outside the canteen is ever shown. It's mentioned a few times that it's a factory but I don't think they ever say what the factory makes. The non-canteen-worker characters have jobs that would exist in any workplace large enough (like Celia Imrie as the human resources manager) or mostly look more like they work in an office than on the factory floor (which makes sense if the factory has offices on site, but there's not much sign of the factory side).

Dinnerladies reminds me of my first workplace, which was a concrete factory with an office on the same site, and had a canteen almost exactly like that, except the kitchen was in the middle, with separate dining areas for 'staff' and 'workers' on either side. There were two dinner ladies, who did breakfast for the factory at 9am, then came around the offices with a trolley at 11, then back to do lunch for the factory at 12, with the office lunch at 1 (hardly any of us went there, to be honest.

When I tell the people I work with now that this was what it was like, I feel like I'm 100 years old.

I've been for interviews at Bovis Homes a few times - where there is still (afaik) a subsidised staff restaurant which serves hot meals at their head office in New Ash Green.

[Senior Baiano]

Steve = Steve Fleming, the creepy guy who briefly replaces Malcolm in one of the later series. CHOO FUCKING CHOO!

"I'm going to take you down Malcolm, I'm going to take you down, to Funky town. Funky town centre, HERE YOU COME"

Still sends me.

[Mr Vegetables]

I would draw a distinction between times where the jobs are all vague because it makes for a better show, and those where the jobs are all vague for in-universe reasons. From what I know about politics the Thick of It would be much closer to the second of these.

I guess sometimes this is a dramatic device, and sometimes it's just a representation of how things actually work in the real world? There's probably not a hard line between those, but there is a clear distinction