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CBS doesn’t understand Millennials, and it wants you to know it. For a network that constantly insists that it’s not just for older viewers, the conceit of one of CBS’ newest comedies implies the opposite. The Great Indoors focuses on a rough-and-tumble Gen X-er who has to work with a group of useless Millennials at an outdoors magazine. Shenanigans ensue!
During TCA’s 2016 Summer tour, the series made headlines for offending Millennial members of the media. It was an odd moment that launched what was sure to be a forgettable CBS sitcom into the middle of a generational war. But is the series really that offensive to the one generation that has been think-pieced to death? This Millennial decided to find out. I watched several episodes of The Great Indoors to see if it was worth the initial outrage it produced. Am I aware that writing a think-piece about whether a series is offensive to Millennials is the most Millennial thing I’ve ever done? Absolutely. But here’s what I found:
What’s The Great Indoors about?
Created by Mike Gibbons, the sitcom focuses on the office life of Outdoor Limits. There’s just one problem with this outdoors magazine — it’s run by a group of Millennials who would rather Instagram their Seamless orders than go outside. That’s where famed adventure reporter Jack Gordon (Joel McHale), a snarky and no-nonsense presence who’s determined to toughen up his co-workers, comes in.
The general idea of The Great Indoors is that all Millennials are ridiculous and sensitive snowflakes that need to grow up. Clark (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) hosts an outdoors podcast but has nothing to say. Emma (Christine Ko) is a social media influencer who exudes entitlement. Mason (Shaun Brown) has no fixed sexuality. All of these characteristics are presented as zany oddities.
So is the show offensive to Millennials?
If you were a Millennial character on The Great Indoors, you’d immediately yell “Yes.” However, I think most viewers are too aware of how all-around reductive the series is to take it seriously. The characters watch like BuzzFeed’s most idiotic quizzes come to life with a helping of “everything politically correct is objectively terrible” on the side. Millennials tweet too much, and they don’t know how to camp, so they suck — which is fine. The Great Indoors never claimed it would rebuild generational divides. It just said it would be a comedy, and it is that.
Tonally, the series has a lot in common with The Big Bang Theory’s first season as almost all of its jokes focus on how one group is out of touch with the world. The show is not yet developed enough to focus on the relationships between its main characters nor does it offer a solution to make its Millennial characters less insufferable. It merely wishes to point and laugh at generational differences. While that idea can certainly carry a sketch, it can’t really carry a series. Also, because the series never knows the exact argument it wants to make, I never found it worthy of being insulting. That’s largely because …
The show undermines its central joke.
For The Great Indoors to work, it has to establish that Millennials are useless slackers, and Gen X-ers are morally upstanding hard workers. However, the central plot of the series contradicts this idea. The main reason Outdoor Limits is successful is because of how tech-savvy its staff is. Sure, they’ve been publishing articles and lists without fulling understanding the topic — a very relatable concept in today’s content-focused landscape — but they are keeping a publication in business. Jack’s character, on the other hand, is more of a luxury for the publication, adding a note of authenticity to an organization that’s already working. If the central argument of The Great Indoors is supposed to be that Millennials need to “build character,” it doesn’t work. The older generation in The Great Indoors is just as insufferable as the younger one, if only for different reasons.
Clark, Emma, and Mason are overly sensitive slackers, but Jack and the magazine’s Baby Boomer founder Roland (Stephen Fry) are selfish jerks and outdated relics. As much as they mock Outdoor Limits’ team, it’s clear that neither Jack nor Roland have a chance of catching up to the 21st century without them. The show relies on Brooke (Susannah Fielding) to stand between the two generations, trying to coddle the Millennials while making the two men seem more sensitive. As a result, the central message of the show seems to be everyone is terrible, but we should laugh at Millennials.
The sad thing is, The Great Indoors could have been so much better.
Because this is another network comedy starring Joel McHale, comparisons to Dan Harmon’s Community are obviously going to be made, and they should be. Community handled generational differences in a much more nuanced and insightful way than The Great Indoors has so far. The NBC show juggled several themes — failure, racism, sexism, the importance of friendship, otherness, behavioral disorders — but chief among them was generational divisions. The study group featured members from three different generations and a multitude of different backgrounds. No, they didn’t understand each other all the time or even most of the time, but they could always find common ground, and they at least tried to see eye to eye. That’s not the case with The Great Indoors.
It’s really fun to see Joel McHale back in snarky form, a characterization he has perfected. However, aside from the occasional one liner, The Great Indoors is a forgettable series that focuses so much on being controversial, it forgets to make a full argument. My advice? Watch Community instead.
