4/16/2019 TV and Tipworkification « Post45 post45.research.yale.edu/2019/01/tv-and-tipworkification/ 1/22 C Issue 1: Deindustrialization and the New Cultures of Work Post45 TV and Tipworkification Annie McClanahan 01.10.19 ontemporary TV demonstrates a conspicuous interest in two related kinds of employ- ment: tipwork (waiting tables, bartending, making espressos) and the more recent form of work termed "gigwork" (temporary, project-based freelance work, especially the sort mediated via online platforms). On recent xctionalized shows including Atlanta, Broad City, Crashing, Easy, Girls, The Good Place, BoJack Horseman, High Maintenance, Insecure, It's Al- ways Sunny in Philadelphia, Master of None, Silicon Valley, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, To- getherness, Two Broke Girls, Search Party, and Westworld, we xnd characters driving for Uber, serving drinks, working for TaskRabbit or Mechanical Turk, making espressos, renting their bedrooms on Airbnb, delivering consumer goods, and waitressing. On the "reality" side of contemporary TV, likewise, the newest genre is the service work show. 1 Vanderpump Rules, for instance, depicts the staff of LA's SUR restaurant and is currently xlming its seventh sea- son; Below Deck is about the crew members on chartered yachts, and Apres Ski and Timber Creek Lodge feature the service staff of an "ultra-luxurious ski lodge." Each episode of Below Deck begins as the "yachties" are informed of their next group of "clients"; it then depicts the various tensions that emerge on the 3-5 day voyage and ends with the presentation of a group tip which is divided equally among the staff. This climactic act of tipping enables the show to see the customers as the tipworkers themselves do — as a trivial, temporary means to an end or a necessary evil. Below Deck's representation of the alienation specixc to tipwork — where one has not one stable employer but many temporary bosses whose desires are as unpredictable as are the tips they pay you to meet them — is, I will suggest, representative of the contemporary genre of tipwork TV. Of course, TV's interest in work and the workplace is not new. The so-called "First Golden Age of Television" of the 1950s was largely dominated by variety shows and domestic sitcoms, and TV scholars like Seraxna Bathrick, Ella Taylor, and Michael Tueth have noted that the workplace series didn't really "come into its own" until The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which ran from 1970-1977. 2 Taylor inyuentially argues that the workplace TV of the 1970s combined the older domestic narrative with a new workplace narrative: the result was what she calls the "work-family series" which imagined "a workplace utopia whose most fulxlling attributes are vested not in work activity but in close emotional ties between coworkers." Shows like Mary Tyler Moore, M*A*S*H, WKRP in Cincinnati, Taxi, and The Bob Newhart Show, she claims, construct an ethic of professionalism and imagine the familial workplace