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Team-Leader: Cracked Canadian Cubicle Comedy

Jeffrey Madison

Team-Leader is the darkly comic tale of two self-involved office slackers and what happens when their carefully-crafted world of professional laziness is up-ended suddenly.

The opening webisode transcends most online dramatic comedy in its first minute. Brooke and Alice play the joined-at-the-hip, platonically coed, co-habitating duo, who by the way, also draw their paychecks from the very same company. On this day, they ease into their shared cube farm, tardy as usual, ripe for another creatively wasted day “on the dole”–only to discover their hopelessly overworked team leader, dead. The confirmation of said fact may just be simultaneously the most cinematic and most inappropriate moment in the Internet’s recorded history.

Webisodes Two and Three of Team-Leader continue in great comedic fashion where webisode One left off, with Brooke and Alice and their fellow team members rapidly running through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous Five Stages of Grief. Let me be clear, these twenty-somethings are too self-consumed to energize their grief over their erstwhile immediate supervisor. Instead, this crew moves from one stage to another because the suicide reveals an inconvenient truth: Everyone had delegated their share of the annual, major client presentation load to their now dead colleague.

Now it looms large, less than 72 hours away, the lifeblood of this little company. Of all the no-ones who make up this hilarious team, someone has to pick up the slack, pick up the pace, and carry them all to securing a client victory. The remaining 10 webisodes explore how Brooke and Alice will rise or unravel to the occasion. Their first courses of action? Avoid taking any responsibility and assigning blame.

Like good action movies, where the draw is not from the promise of a good story so much as it is from the potential to witness amazingly unique action sequences, Team-Leader offers up its share of incredibly creative, one-off scenic delights. More than that, this series also offers its viewers food for thought. How will churlish young adults deal with a universal fear–What if I can’t find the will to mature instantly in the face of an unrelentingly brutal reality?

Brooke and Alice believe they have Life by the tail. They each have a swell-paying job, and they don’t bring it home, either. Their nights are trivia games, competing at Mario Kart and smoking ganja. Their days are late arrivals, long lunches and getting over on their two supervisors–company president Roxanne and the departed team-leader, Kate “the Cake” MacIntosh. In other words, Brooke and Alice haven’t really evolved since Middle School, and yet they’ve managed to make a good living that way.

Then Cake has the audacity to commit the most heinous of passive-aggressive moves–suicide. Brooke and Alice discover that now more than ever, the maturity that they have together worked so diligently to keep at bay now has them cornered. Like two children suddenly orphaned and left with only one another, this pair has one of two simple choices to make: 1.) sit up, buck up and grow up; or 2.) deny, deny, deny.

People will compare Team-Leader with NBC’s “The Office”. While their flattery may be genuine, it actually undervalues the work done by the Team-Leader production crew. Where “The Office” is a parody of real-life workplace, and of the reality television series genre, Team-Leader is a completely fantastical fiction effort. Where the goal of “The Office” creators is to produce 100 episodes (traditionally the magic number needed to acquire a lucrative syndication deal), the goal of Team-Leader creators Chris Forrest, Josh Budd, Scott Albert and Christopher Guest is to keep the Team-Leader run short and sweet. This American tendency to run any good series to its bitter end strengthens the chance of diluted writing; lessens the quality of the product; and ultimately increases the likelihood that “The Office” will “jump the shark.” Structuring Team-Leader similarly to a Spanish-language telenovela, with a definitive end, insures high quality throughout, inspires fan loyalty, and guarantees a compelling (albeit bittersweet) finale.

Team-Leader is a 12 part, live action short form, multi-platform sitcom distributed by Gopher X Productions. It gets a .comDish! “T” for Teens and above rating. The final moment of the twelfth webisode possesses as much creative genius as the first minute of webisode One. So although Team-Leader left me yearning for more, it didn’t leave me feeling cheated. I am willing to bet you’ll feel the same way, too. But don’t leave me hanging onto an open bet. Tell me if you agree or disagree. I’m all eyes.

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Team-Leader: Cracked Canadian Cubicle Comedy

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