Review: Inside Job Reinvents the Workplace Comedy

The Netflix show ostensibly satirizes government control, but it is not made for anyone truly suspicious of government power.

The premise of Netflix's Inside Job gives what sounds like an inventive twist to the workplace comedy. Its shenanigans are set at Cognito Inc., a shadowy government cabal that secretly controls world politics.

While the premise seems rife with potential, the show ultimately fails to use its opportunities—or even to be funny at all. Despite portraying self-professed deep state overlords, the show never strays from H.R.-approved jokes with all the smugness of a BuzzFeed listicle. A particularly groan-inducing sequence includes a feckless security guard exclaiming "Aliens? A woman in charge of a team? No one will believe this!"

The show's version of the deep state unwittingly comes across as a slightly higher-tech version of our surface government bureaucracy, where the strings are pulled primarily by self-righteous, technocratic do-gooders. Inside Job more or less treats this as a good thing, never stopping to consider the irony of crafting a secret new world order run by the kinds of people who staff Democratic congressional offices.

Inside Job ostensibly satirizes government control, but it is not made for anyone truly suspicious of government power—at least, not the kind of government power that drives our own ever-expanding state.