Getting On: Season 1 (2012)

The U.S. adaptation of Getting On started airing roughly a decade after the U.S. adaptation of The Office, and it’s an interesting indication of how things have changed in the interim. As in The Office, the setting is a bleak workplace – in this case, the Billy Barnes Extended Care Unit, part of a struggling hospital in Long Beach, California. In charge of the unit is recently demoted Dr. Jenna James (Laurie Metcalfe), who deals with her downward mobility by devoting her time to research, most of which revolves around experimental urogenital procedures. Directly beneath her are head nurse Dawn Forchette (Alex Borstein) and two recent employees – nurse Didi Ortley (Niecy Nash) and supervising nurse Patsy de la Serda (Mel Rodriguez). As in The Office, the series is driven by the rhythm and flow of the workplace, and the way it consumes and absorbs the lives of its employees and residents. However, given that what we’re dealing with is only ever a step away from Palliative Care – a step that Dr. James tries to narrow with a dubious hospice get-rich-quick scheme – it’s an even more bleak and unforgiving rhythm than to be found in The Office, especially since we never leave the premises of Billy Barnes, at least in Season 1, a narrative challenge that series creators Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer approach with the same ingenuity to be found in the British original. At the same time, though, Getting On seems less phased by that than The Office, since, some ten years down the track, this doesn’t really feel that surprising, unexpected or even alienating any more, just a quotidian neoliberal lifeworld that everyone’s learned to adapt to in order to survive. As a result, there’s a much more robust sense of solidarity and community than in The Office, even as the backdrop has become more dire, a robustness that comes, in part, from a cast that’s almost entirely composed of women (the Extended Care Unit is a female facility), and in which gender feels more and more provisional at every turn. Trapped in a world in which day and night simply seemed to have been absorbed into work time, the series seems to suggest that women and sexual minorities have become so well versed in what it takes to merely survive that they’re the best equipped to lead us through the precarity that seems to increase with every episode, but which also always seems to be dodged and eluded at the last minute by the kinds of profoundly comic solidarities that have started to spring up in so much ensemble television of late. In particular, it feels of a piece with the nu-L.A. of Transparent and Togetherness, as the Extended Care Unit becomes something of pressure point for the invisible urban sprawl that stretches out all directions. L.A. ensemble dramas often yearn for a still point, a mythical centre, but that’s all in the past for these television series, which go in the opposite direction, elasticising and manipulating the sprawl until it feels something like a home, something like the willingness to recover and rediscover family that Olsen and Scheffer brought to Big Love.