“Corporate,” on Comedy Central, is a show defined by its lighting. This
half-hour comedy should win a special Emmy for its skill in evoking the
degraded radiance of life under the fluorescent tubes of a nauseating
office environment. In the office shared by the protagonists, Matt and
Jake, who are “junior executives in training” at an amoral conglomerate,
the desktop screens infuse their faces with a seasick glow.

It is the light of one terrible truth. Since at least as far back as
“The Dick Van Dyke Show,” it has been common for workplace sitcoms to
depict office mates as members of a surrogate family—often put upon,
sometimes disenthralled, but rarely so morose as the characters here.
Even shows with a healthily jaded eye for conference-room idiocy and
break-room toadying are warmed by affection, typically, and manage to
locate a redemptive coziness in the nubby texture of cubicle partitions.
However, “Corporate” ends its first season, tonight, having forcefully
rejected all such attitudes in favor of dark farce. Each episode tours a
“bottomless void of loneliness,” as Matt puts it. “I can’t wait to
die—sounds so relaxing,” Jake says, in an episode titled “The Pain of
Being Alive.” The show owes, and repays, a debt to the lively nihilism
of Mike Judge, but forgoes the insurrectionism of his “Office Space” and
precise ridicule of “Silicon Valley” to represent the fates of
subjugants who are nearly too weak to moan. It is as if Billy Wilder’s
“The Apartment” had no exits, story-wise.

Matt, played by Matt Ingebretson, is the more sympathetic of the two
non-heroes because he is the more earnest. The earnestness, in turn,
puts him at a professional disadvantage: because he clings stubbornly to
hope and to civility, he is frequently disappointed in ways that bring
his depression into high relief. Matt is a bit tall, slightly gangly,
and always heavy-lidded from a combination of fatigue and lethargy. One
episode, in which Matt’s wearying work on a spreadsheet tallying
on-the-job causes of death over the decades leads him to commune with a
ghost, dallies with the possibility that the outlandish awfulness of his
workplace is all a dream. There is the frequent sense, too, that the
indignities, absurdities, and ironies of the story lines unspool as if
from a threshold state of consciousness.

Jake, played by Jake Weisman, possesses a survival-skill cynicism, which
has enabled him to internalize the values of global capitalism.
(Ingebretson and Weisman created the series with their director, Pat
Bishop.) He, too, is miserable, but a spark of careerism ignites flames
of motivation, and he glibly cruises along, his whole personality a
coping mechanism. When Matt worries that he is wasting his life at this
job, Jake counters, “There’s no way not to waste your life. The best you
can do is find something you love and work so hard and so long at it
that it eventually becomes something you mostly complain about.” The
clarity of his vision bespeaks either the hard-earned realism of a
well-adjusted adult or the coolly analytic thought process of a
sociopath.

The boys—and it is essential to the characterizations that they are boys,
with juvenile dependency part of the plight—work for an atomic octopus
of a company called Hampton DeVille. Its chief executive, played by
Lance Reddick, is described as “a gun with an Ivy League education.” The
corporate slogan is “We make everything,” in keeping with interests
ranging from agriculture and war profiteering to super fracking and
personal technology. (An early episode concerns a crisis in the
marketing of a touchscreen device called the Obelisk, billed as eight
times larger than an iPad.)

The boys are elevated above the office’s drones and mumbling gnomes,
close enough to real power that they are steadily frustrated in their
inability to taste it. In the big boardroom, they sit not at the main
table, which is a circular model slick enough for a SPECTRE meeting, but
off to one side, beneath a motivational poster juxtaposing an injunction
to “stay hungry” against the open mouth of a charging shark. Each week,
they endure a quest involving the termination of a social-media manager,
or the agony of a day-long meeting, or the assembly of a PowerPoint
presentation meant to win a contract supplying arms for a secret war,
illustrating bullet points with actual bullets. Their immediate
superiors, John (Adam Lustick) and Kate (Anne Dudek), share a
go-getter’s pep that overlays an affinity for barbarism. Their reluctant
ally is Grace (Aparna Nancherla), an H.R. rep forever knitting her brows
and emitting soft, rising-pitch whines that substitute for primal
screams.

But the catharsis of a scream never comes. “Corporate” keeps its
audience in a state of suspended anxiety, and yet it somehow acts as a
balm, a numbing agent that responds to the eerie calm of corporate power
with a tranquillity in kind. It leaves open the question of whether the
malaise besetting Matt and Jake is a disease specific to late-phase
capitalism or fundamental to the human condition. There is a goofy Zen
in its spirit of acceptance, a feeling well expressed in the creators’
vanity card, the production-company logo that plays at the end of each
episode: a man wearing a suit in a wooded glade lofts two black garbage
bags in the air and collapses under them when they fall, while yellow
lettering blares, “Incredible success!” You can imagine this bit of video, infinitely looped, as an art installation paying a giddy tribute
to grim futility.