Photography courtesy of Fox
Does Someone Have to Go? is what you might say to a toddler in the middle of potty training. It’s also the name of a new reality show on Fox that turns office politics into a sort of mortal roulette: a group of co-workers are encouraged to criticize each other face-to-face for being “detrimental to the company,” and then up to three of them are voted off the island (i.e. fired) by their peers.
This gladiators-fighting-to-the-death style of entertainment came to St. Louis for two episodes documenting a white-collar battle royale amongst the cubicles of True Home Value, a large remodeling company that owns its own materials factories, but has supposedly fallen on hard times following dwindling sales.
The first episode aired last night and is viewable online, and the concluding second installment will air next week.
These shows are tension incarnate. It is nearly Hitchcockian how the machinations of personality at an unremarkable Earth City office rise rapidly to a thoroughly cutthroat level. These people are fighting for their jobs (thanks to the fang-licking executives at Fox), and because next week's second episode may well end with the firing of several people from this dysfunctional office, the viewer finds himself siding with and against various characters in the real-life drama. Do you believe that Matt the put-upon salesman is trustworthy or just a whiner? Does office manager Sharon really show up for work drunk? Is Mark the sales manager merely arrogant or a font of verbal abuse who should be kept away from good people? Truly, these are ho-hum, run-of-the-mill disagreements for anyone working in a modern office, but Does Someone Have to Go? raises the stakes and turns them into Game of Thrones meets Death of a Salesman.
The action heats up when the co-workers are interviewed regarding their opinions about one another, as workers and as people. Afterward, these taped interviews are, we are led to believe (this is reality TV, so all bets are off as to the authenticity of any of it), shown unexpectedly in a single conference room where all parties are assembled.
Watching these poor people react to the brutal honesty with which they evaluate one another is painful. No one should have to endure this.
When the (alleged) office drunk is universally vilified for being intoxicated at work, the video stops, and the ensuing silence in the room is mortifying. No one can speak. Neither Sharon the supposed alcoholic nor her accusers knew when they woke up that day they’d soon be participating in a real-life intervention. These kind of naked, exposed feelings will either tear an office apart or eventually bring the whole gang together in shared vulnerability, and the jury’s still out on this one.
In the meantime, the co-workers leave the conference room, and sparks fly. Accusations, tears, and defensiveness fill the office as people gather in small groups to plot and confront one another—instead of, you know, to actually work.
Soon the Guinea pigs in this corporate experiment return to the conference room, which has rapidly become not merely a boring venue but a loathsome one. Now, the ultimate mortification: a slideshow revealing each worker’s salary to the rest of the group.
The shame of those making far too little and the mild embarrassment mingled with pride of those making far too much is palpable. Also palpable: jealousy, disbelief, and anger. At this point, the True Home Value employees are exposed like a group of hostages forced by their captors to strip in the vault of the bank during a heist. Everyone can see what everyone else is made of. It’s vile.
But it’s not over. Now, the coup de grace: the co-workers will vote to determine the three employees “most detrimental to the company.”
Sharon, perhaps out of the same misplaced sense of guilt that led her to drink in the first place, throws herself into the void by actually voting herself as one of the most detrimental. The vote is tallied back in the Conference Room of Doom. We won’t spoil it for you here. We will say it is a ghoulish and tasteless exercise—in other words, everything you desire from reality TV.
The end...almost. Part two airs next Thursday, and in that concluding episode, the co-workers decide which of the three, if any, will be fired.
In all of the anger and tears, a number of salient points go unaddressed. How much of this alleged sales decline is the fault of the recession? How much of it is the fault of the business’s owner, who only appears to his staff in videos, like some kind of arrogant sci-fi movie villain who demands his underlings’ souls in the name of home remodeling? And speaking of souls, how much of this is driven by the often soul-sucking aspect of simply working in sales? (See: American Beauty, the Maysles brothers’ documentary Salesman, Glengarry Glen Ross, etc.)
And of, course “reality TV” is the ultimate euphemism—how much of this is as real as it appears? We’ll probably never know.
Many will remember a certain short story they read in high school, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” in which the idea of the scapegoat takes on modern, newly sinister dimensions.
The name of the show Does Someone Have to Go? implicitly promotes the same paradigm—the expulsion of one of us will save the rest of us.
Um, I’d like to be the one to go, please—I’d like to go away from the TV. But I’m not sure I can. Now, despite myself, I have to watch part two next week.
Watch clips and complete episodes of Does Someone Have to Go? here. Part two of the two-part True Home Value saga will air Thurs., June 27 at 8 p.m. on Fox.
