Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Inside Job’ On Netflix, A Funny Animated Series About A Corporation That’s Actually The “Deep State”

Face it: We all have friends or family members that think the rest of us “sheeple” are blind to the manipulations of the “deep state.” What if that deep state really existed, but as a private corporation? That’s the idea behind the new animated series Inside Job.

INSIDE JOB: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A shot of the White House. A guy is drinking outside of the fence. When a tour group of kids comes by and the guide says, “The government works for you!”, the man says, “Bullshit!’

The Gist: The man starts to rant and rave to the kids about lizard people and the deep state, until his daughter comes and embarrassingly tells him to get in her car. She is Reagan Ridley (Lizzy Caplan), one of the lead engineers at Cognito, Inc., a company that her father Rand (Christian Slater) used to run until, well, he went nuts.

As we see when the two of them walk through the building, Cognito, Inc. isn’t your average corporation. It’s actually the “deep state” everyone talks about, with aliens, the aforementioned lizard people, and all sorts of stuff going on that mirrors what your crazy uncle used to talk about at Thanksgiving. Reagan is up for a lead engineering position, but the current CEO, J.R. Scheimpough (Andy Daly), thinks that Reagan is lacking the people skills to do the job.

J.R. pairs her up with a blank-faced recent college graduate named Brett Hand (Clark Duke). He’s a former frat boy who ingratiated himself to J.R. on the golf course; as much of a glad-handler as he is, though, Brett knows that he’s in over his head. They lead a pretty eclectic team: Dr. Andre (Bobby Lee), who likes to experiment with all sorts of substances; Glenn Dolphman (John DiMaggio), a human-dolphin hybrid; Gigi Thompson (Tisha Campbell), a PR expert and the Head of Media Manipulation; and Magic Myc (Brett Gelman) who, along with being the office jerk, is a plant-like being that can read minds.

Reagan hates being paired with Brett, but she’s too busy getting her robot president project — ROBOTUS — off the ground. The idea is to kidnap the current less-than-bright president (who looks suspiciously like Mitt Romney) and sub in a controllable robot. But when J.R. suspends Reagan for mental health reasons, Rand adds some code to the robot president that would make him become sentient when flashbulbs went off, making him spew all sorts of patriotic claptrap.

When ROBOTUS goes rogue, it’s up to Reagan and Brett to stop him. After the defeat him (and disarm the nuclear football), Reagan figures out that she needs “a mediocre white man to be a human shield and a social lubricant.”

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? American Dad, but much more paranoid in tone. Or maybe Futurama, but rooted in the present day.

Our Take: Inside Job executive producer Shion Takeuchi is used to working on shows (Gravity Falls, Regular Show) and films (Inside Out) that take  bit of an askew world view, so a cartoon about an shadow government that runs the “deep state” seems to be something that’s in her wheelhouse. But what she and the rest of the show’s writers get right is that they still base the show in character-driven humor, but with enough gags to make sharp-eyed viewers laugh their butts off.

Takeuchi and company are able to balance the fact that “Cognito, Inc.” (which is a anagramish way to say “Incognito”… get it?) runs just like any other dopey corporation and that your coworkers are likely both your closest confidants and biggest impediments to success with, well, the whole deep state thing. It’s an idea that has legs because the main characters are established well right off the bat. Reagan has a personality problem, as we see when she uses an attack robot to get her team to file their time sheets. Brett is so blank-faced that even the way he’s animated is featureless. But, when they work together, we see more to each of their characters than we usually see in the first episode of any comedy.

It helps when the cast is chock full of big names that are also fine voice actors. We’re especially tickled at hearing Slater as the paranoid and off-kilter Rand, who will constantly be there to be his daughter’s biggest supporter and biggest thorn in her side. But Caplan, Campbell, Duke, Gelman, DiMaggio, Daly and Lee all do their job to embody their characters well and not just be celebrity voices.

We mentioned Futurama above, and that feels like the direction the show is going in, where it becomes a workplace comedy that happens to take place in a very unusual workplace. If that’s where it’s going (and the episode descriptions seem to indicate that’s where it’s headed), then this should be a satisfying show filled with characters who grow, change, and — in some funny cases — stubbornly stay exactly the same as always.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: As the team leaves J.R.’s office to get margaritas, Brett bemoans the fact that Reagan has to incinerate ROBOTUS. Then, many floors below, we see a damaged ROBOTUS in a glass cell, watching Reagan on a monitor.

Sleeper Star: Pretty much anything Brett Gelman does is hilarious, and he’s got some of the best lines as the jerky but mysterious Myc.

Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Because Inside Job immediately establishes its characters, its brand of humor goes way beyond just seeing lizard people struggle with the Keurig machine in the break room. And that’s what will make the series last a few seasons.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Inside Job On Netflix