When Disney announced they’d be launching a workplace comedy based on the Monsters, Inc. franchise, panic set in.
Memories of the ill-fated 2015 ABC workplace comedy The Muppets (which we covered weekly on the site) immediately sprang to mind. That show had all the potential in the world but squandered it by trying too hard to crowbar the old The Muppet Show format into The Office format. The result was a disastrous return to prime time for Kermit and company.
Yet, the reason that Monsters at Work is successful is that the creators of the series don’t try to make the show something else. They’re not aiming to place Mike, Sully, and company into a preconceived format – they’re looking to expand the world of Monstropolis and by doing so create a natural, organic extension of the Monsters, Inc. universe.
The series picks up literally after the Scare Floor is transformed into The Laugh Floor at Monsters Inc. Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal, City Slickers), Sully (John Goodman, Monsters University), and Celia (Jennifer Tilly, Family Guy) have transitioned into management roles and are overseeing the new direction of the company. Meanwhile, highly-recruited scarer from Monsters University Tylor Tuskmon (Ben Feldman, Super Store) heads to the company, and his dreams of becoming a top scarer are dashed upon arrival as he’s relegated to the mechanic shop until he becomes funny. In the shop, he encounters the friendly, bumbling manager Fritz (Henry Winkler, Happy Days), the maliciously ambitious Duncan P. Anderson (Lucas Neff, Raising Hope), and Tylor’s former Monsters U classmate, the hyper-friendly Val Little (Mindy Kaling, The Mindy Project).
The series is able to deftly keep the two worlds of old and new characters far enough away from each other and let them exist on their own, yet never have the series feel like two separate shows. The result is a feeling of freshness and nostalgia that never sacrifices laughs or sentiment, the hallmark of the Monsters movies.
You’ll rarely find an episode where you don’t get Mike and Sully engaged in some of their classic back and forth, and thankfully Crystal and Goodman are so good in these roles that you never feel like they’re recycling the greatest hits. Mike is still as high strung as ever, yet Goodman imbues a bit more good-natured jolliness into Sully which only heightens into Crystal’s overreactions.
Yet, it’s the new characters that are the most intriguing. Of course, this in itself is a feat as Mike and Sully have been huge parts of the Pixar/Disney zeitgeist for two decades. Yet, the struggles of Tylor, Val’s weird obsession with him, and the bumbling goofiness of Fritz keep you hooked. They’re all very well-rounded, lived-in characters that have such depth and warmth to them that you want to know their story. The odd chemistry between Val and Tylor is the stuff of sitcom gold, and it’s a joy to listen to sitcom staples Feldman and Kaling flex the muscles that made them part of our lives via Superstore and The Office respectively.
Monsters at Work does not reinvent the wheel of the workplace sitcom, but it does give us a new spin. It’s able to be a kid-friendly animated series that easily appeals to adults without eye-rolling pandering. It’s able to bridge the generational gap between those who fell in love with Mike and Sully 20+ years ago and the ones viewing the Laugh Floor for the first time. This little series does a lot of work and it pays off – producing one of the streamers’ most engaging original pieces of content to date.
