TV
INSIDE JOB
EMMA CAMP
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 selfprofessed deep state overlords, the show never strays from H.R.-approved jokes with all the smugness of a BuzzFeed listicle. A particularly groaninducing 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 highertech version of our surface government bureaucracy, where the strings are pulled primarily by self-righteous, technocratic do-gooders. 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
