So let's not ignore it- instead, let's give an example on a smaller scale, about the size of a mid-sized city somewhere within the geological middle of the continental United States. Let's focus on a handful of characters working in the worst to endure yet most necessary industry man has ever devised: the service industry. This city is Cityville, the main foci of our documentary are the workers who are stuck working inside a theater multiplex dealing with customers ranging from the asinine to the obnoxious to the vitriolic, and their associated friends, family, and acquaintances. This is the setting for the show Zoolaplex, an audio drama that is as of writing in its second season.
The first season aired on New Year's Day in January 2015 with it and the subsequent episode acting as a prologue set in early 2014, hilariously written and reminiscent of Kevin Smith's fim Clerks; you're introduced to the majority of the main cast with some exceptions, the customer interactions are funny, the interactions between the crew members are played for laughs. The situations involved are all light or played lightly- there is a drug dealer subplot in the first episode with a funny twist ending and the second episode revolves around the Zoolaplex's resident human resources and marketing guru, Alize Abendroth, trying to outthink Hollywood in order to beat other cineplexes to the advertizing punch (spoiler: never try to outfink Hollywood).
The third episode is set the month of its release more or less, and introduces one of the last main cast members that needed to appear, Ray McAllister, a young man trying hard to make the money to attend university and someone who you get to see come into his own throughout the series and begin to identify himself proudly as a member of the Zoolaplex staff; others are introduced throughout the series, clinical psychologist Sonia Labeau who becomes a close friend of (most of) the Zoolaplex staff in episode 4. Ray's stoner roommate Doug in episode 5, B-story main man Casey DeLaine in episode 6 who is unique and flamboyant and utterly and unabashedly his own self, a handful of important side characters who recur nearly as much as the main cast in episodes 7 and 8, and the last real major Zoolaplex staff member shows up in the season finale.
But you better hold your horses if you think this audio rodeo is all a big laughing stock. You're making assumptions based on your first impression, and that's a mistake you make that the show is very much aware of. In fact, it's one of the four main striking themes in Zoolaplex: there's more to everything than first meets the eye, progress brings about understanding, things that you think didn't affect anything will affect things farther down the line, and there's nothing more obvious to need but hard to achieve in this day and age as respect. You can see this clearly in the beginning by looking at how the characters change. They go from fairly two-dimensional comical caricatures, like slacker class clown who never grew out of the clown mentality Andy Evans, his cunning master charlatan sister Leanne, grumbling stoic pessimist extraordinaire Drake Moran, and violent robber-bashing supervisor Larry Crawford, all of whom more or less fight with each other and have snark-fests, to characters with complexity, emotional depth, a personality beyond just their stereotypical archetype. Starting with roughly episode five, you see more sides to the characters; you get a deeper understanding of Larry's mentality, you see more of Ray's current fragility and wishes to solidify himself, you don't quite understand why Drake is so vitriolic about the world as a whole but you realize pretty quickly that there's more to it than meets the eye and that something brought his state of mind about. You see more of them than you saw when the series was strictly humorous. Drake has a soft spot, Larry beyond the violent trait is a brother figure like no other and a wellspring of support, Leanne is basically a member of the staff herself even though she's not officially employed there. There's something beneath the surface of all these characters, and you're only starting to see the bigger picture. By the sixth episode, the interactions of the cast as a whole become clearer; they might be conflicting personalities, but they are a family to each other and they will help each other out without fail.
But that doesn't just apply to the characters; no no no, the idea of there being more to it than meets the eye is true for the entire show itself. It's not a gag-a-day show about shenanigans in a cinema with rowdy, obnoxious customers. You start seeing the comical shenanigans sort of go down two main avenues: a little more over-the-top and grander in scope, such as an army of zombie-like hipsters and a pseudo-religious cult brought about by- of all things- a union strike at a butter factory, and you start seeing episodes get a little more real, less based in humor. Episode four deals with character introspection, bringing a lot of the previously described deeper characterization to life. Episode five introduces the first of many realistically manipulative, despicable, bigoted villains, Charles Wickman, whose first action during his reveal is to manipulate an illegally immigrated cab driver trying to escape from a horrible life in his hoe country into giving him free fare, then ruining his life entirely for fun, then goes on to almost manipulate sexual favors, harass and belittle and spout slurs, and generally be scum of the earth. Don't worry- the further you go, the more people like Charles our group will encounter. In episode seven, we learn more about assistant manager Caroline's home life, and it is brutal without getting into detail. Episode eight deals with the darkest theme in the entire season, and it's played horribly straight, and the scars that are brought out in that episode come to light later on- and this is after the majority of the episode is already about the effects of something innocuous from the very first episode that you might have forgotten or passed over or just laughed about that causes real harm to people. This is the real power that the show has- things that you don't think affected anyone or anything, can and will. Things that you thought were just a situation of the week have a far longer reach than just the one episode and that things last. And even within the episodes situations that seemed silly become more complex- the hipster zombies are given a twinge of humanity paired with an important message on understanding and looking past stereotypes and public derision.
'But wait,' you say hypothetically, scratching your hypothetical head with hypothetical nails that hypothetically look like they need a good trimming, 'I thought this was a comedy show.' And I will answer this simply: no. No, it is not. There is certainly a comedy element to it throughout the entire series, and it never really goes away, but as you start progressing and seeing more into the lives of these characters and seeing them outside of the titular Zoolaplex, People get hurt, things happen. Laughs are given only because that's the human condition- we find things that are funny and use it to tether ourselves and steel ourselves to the brutal nature of man's inhumanity to man. Things that seemed funny at first even are given a darker twist later on down the line. The story goes from going over things that affect the Zoolaplex and the ability to work, such as the hipster zombies, a butter shortage and the butter cult, drug dealers, advertizing mishaps, and rats in the stockrooms, to dealing with things that affect something far more important: the people. And that's when you realize, it's not comedy. Dramedy, as it bills itself, doesn't even do it justice. It's a case study, on the state of our own world in a side that we barely see, with stretches in plausibility exaggerations that only seem outlandish because they're more or less geared in directions that aren't real stretches in plausibility we see and experience. It's even actually more accepting than our own world: Cityville's service industry workers actually do earn fifteen dollars an hour, harassment is legally permissable to be literally fought against, and there are actually women's centers. But the world is still a shitty place to live in, every bit as much as our own, considering that's exactly what it's based on. Sexual assault, bigotry, betrayal, bullying, mob mentality, and mental health are themes in the first season. Casey, the lovable B-story main man, goes from being a worker at the shipping company that shipped the butter that was targeted by the union-turned-cult and goes into a store encountering a scheme of embezzlement. Caroline's story is gone into more depth, Drake's story is revealed, a deeper understanding and bond between crew members is established, and it quickly becomes apparent that the only thing holding them together is each other and their support, and that their only defense against getting swept away in the big cosmic maelstrom of bigotry and condescension is an "us against the world" mentality.
Season two becomes more blatant. Body positivity, rape culture, misogyny, corporate greed, and the dichotomy between being free to say something and being free to be safe from blatant harassment, just to name a few. Plots from the first season come back in the second with a vengeance and a darker, more realistic twist, and more Charles-level douchebags come into the fray, including a couple someones with close personal ties to the main cast. As the series goes on, and it most assuredly will go on, it will only hit more of the much needed themes that need covering, including classism, sociopolitical and socioeconomic apathy torwards the underpriveleged and destitute and marginalized, and the capacity of corporations to cause harm; you see a small number of CEOs and corporate chairmen and board members, and they're either manipulative or selfish on a childish sense and it shows exactly how they operate on a corporate level. One character's tragic backstory is brought about by suffering caused by a particularly vile corporate action, and seeing how things seem to persist throughout the seasons and episodes so far and how things seem to get on a bigger and bigger scale the farther you look into things, it only seems plausible to state that more depth on the horrible actions of the upper class in the setting will become prominent. The show doesn't openly advocate for class warfare; it sends a message, of needing tolerance and respect and freedom to live your life the way you want to live it without oppression or manipulation or backhanded control by a power that uses its oppressive force to maintain that it's bigger than you. It sends it through the airwaves, via iTunes and YouTube and Soundcloud, and it's a message that starts every time with the dulcet tones of Honest Trailers' own Jon Bailey giving a snarky-as-hell content warning preface. And that's pretty cool.
