"Monsters at Work" Doesn't Work

As a kid, Monsters Inc. was one of my favorite Pixar films. I loved the unique design of each character, the bouncy Randy Newman score, and the colorful world of monsters. More than anything, I loved the interworkings of the Monster Inc. facility. The final confrontation with our heroes riding around on the different doors gave me chills every time. Watching the roller coaster-like mechanics and the hundreds of doors was absolutely mesmerizing. 

Every time I finished watching the film, I would go to the special features section on the DVD and watch all the behind-the-scenes footage that I could. I wanted to learn about what scenes were deleted and why. It's because of movies like this that got me passionate about storytelling from a very young age.

Monsters University was released in theaters when I was in High School. While some critics disliked it for its reliance on typical college movie tropes, comparing it to the likes of Animal House (1978) and Revenge of the Nerds (1984), it was exciting to me as well as other kids our age. I loved spending more time in the world of the original Monsters Inc. and seeing my favorite characters as younger people. Not to mention the moral of the story, which encourages its audience to think out of the box when your own natural abilities can't measure up to everyone's expectations. 

This movie made me want to go to college more than my own school did.

Jump to 2021 when Disney+ (our beloved harbinger of a new world capitalist order) announced a Monsters Inc. series. It was the first Disney+ show I really wanted to watch. I had zero interest in High School Musical: The Series, Diary of a Future President, or even WandaVision. I'm 22 years old and I'm not into the Marvel franchise, so I felt that none of the Disney+ shows really were targeted to me. 

Monsters at Work, however, showed promise. Watching the trailer for the first time, I was hooked. It was one of the few times where I felt that a franchise reboot was actually justified. I wanted to know what happened to the Monsters Inc. company as it made a rocky transformation to laugh power over scream power.

When I finally had time to watch it, I was impressed. 

Impressed by just how bad it was.

For a show that's all about monsters being funny, Monsters at Work rarely got a laugh out of me.

To summarize the plot, Tylor Tuskmon is a new graduate from Monsters University and has earned himself a spot as a scarer at Monsters Inc. Unfortunately he walks right into the ending of the first Monsters Inc. film and discovers that the company will be switching over to laugh power. Tylor, determined to work his way up as a jokester, takes a job for the Monsters Inc. facilities team, also known as MIFT. The MIFTers are the unseen heroes responsible for keeping the facility running. Tylor has to forget about everything he learned in college and start fresh at an entry-level job.

Honestly, episode one wasn't that bad. I really enjoyed it and thought it was a sign of good things to come. The character of Tylor is so relatable as he enters a world that his college education didn't prepare him for. What's even more interesting is that the true A plot of the episode follows Mike and Sulley dealing with becoming the new CEOs of Monsters Inc. Mike and Sulley are the characters I knew and grew up with, so I hoped to see more of them in the series. As the show went on, however, the old characters took the backseat as the new characters became more relevant. This would be fine if the new characters were funny and interesting. 

Surprise, surprise, they weren't.

When first introduced to the MIFTers, Tylor is annoyed by their overzealous personalities and their borderline-religious dedication to their blue collar job. It's funny in the first episode for the most part, because I'm completely on Tylor's side. 

The MIFT team is made up of four new monsters. Three of them absolutely suck.

Val is brightly-colored, extroverted, and full of energy. She's convinced that she and Tylor were best friends in college despite only ever speaking once. Her overexcitement becomes grating really fast. Tylor often rejects her advances, and the show tries to make him seem like the bad guy for it. Uh, no, she's way too clingy for comfort, and Tylor should not feel obligated to be her friend. Not only that, but Val has barely no opinions of her own and contributes to the echo chamber of stupidity that is MIFT.

Duncan is the green and four-eyed monster who I like to call the "Dwight Shrute" of the series. Unlike Dwight, whose comedic timing and deadpan delivery make him a quotable and iconic character, Duncan is just lame. He is Tylor's self-proclaimed rival and continually antagonizes him. Duncan's actions never go farther than lying to sabotage Tylor's attempts to get out of MIFT. Duncan is a character who's all talk and no show, and even when he does talk, it's rarely funny. If anything, his ramblings about how he's ambitious and superior to everyone is boring.

Duncan is not clever enough to be Dwight, and that's saying something.

The least annoying MIFTer and best new character of the show is Cutter, a short and blue crab-like monster. She's the one who got the most laughs out of me because of how different she is. She's dedicated to MIFT, but unlike Val and Duncan who seem oblivious to how grueling the work is, Cutter enjoys the grueling work. She's the most monster-like of all of them, which makes her my new favorite. Unfortunately she doesn't get as much attention as the others do. Perhaps that's a good thing, because they didn't give her character a chance to overstay her warm welcome.

The worst character is their ringleader: Fritz. I hate Fritz with a passion. His design is hideous. He looks like a furry elephant seal with crusty yellow hair ringing his head. His personality is just as ugly. As the head supervisor of MIFT he sees himself as everyone's father figure, a source of one good joke in episode one, but it gets really old really fast. Fritz is overly dramatic about stuff that doesn't matter, like elaborate MIFT hazing ceremonies and the MIFT vending machine. His obsession with making Tylor love him and love MIFT is played for laughs, but comes off as disturbing. He's willfully oblivious to Tylor's true intentions of wanting to get away from MIFT as soon as possible. Fritz is supposed to be the leader of the group, but the character we really get is an immature and overgrown manchild with no sense of personal boundaries. For a monster who's not a scarer, he terrifies me.

Absolutely disgusting.

The show goes on as you might predict. Tylor tries to get ahead in the company, but he begins to accept his place in MIFT as he bonds with his coworkers. This isn't necessarily a bad plot, it's just very predicable. Overall, it just doesn't work because the other MIFTers are so unlikable. They continually step on Tylor's toes and get in the way of his dreams. Any moments of warmth between them is ruined by the fact that they're so oddly fixated with their jobs as the fix-it crew of Monsters Inc. I didn't buy the friendship between Tylor and the other MIFTers for one second. 

I'm a huge fan of the "group of weirdos making a family" trope, but this group of weirdos did not appeal to me in the slightest.

As Tylor's story goes on, we also get scenes of Mike and Sulley. The two of them face problems from bureaucrats who are displeased with the working conditions and energy output of the new Monsters Inc. It becomes hard to watch as Mike shows his complete ineptitude as a CEO and takes away what made me love his character in the first place: his dedication to his craft. Sulley barely has a role in the story at all, which is disappointing because I feel like as the most pivotal monster in the first film, he should have a lot more to say about his company moving forward. At the tenth and final episode of the show, he has a heart-to-heart with Tylor that feels devoid of any impact. We barely saw any of their interactions and know nothing about their supposed mentor-student relationship.

I think that's the bigger picture I'm getting at: Everything about Monsters at Work feels unearned. 

The unearned emotions stem from its noticeably unlikable characters. I like to call this the Patrick Star effect: if a character is so stupid for comedic effect that they end up causing more problems than fixing the, then that makes them unlikable. A lot of children's show writers think that a character who's stupid automatically makes them funny. What matters most is how their chemistry matches up with the other characters in the show. Sheen and Carl from Jimmy Neutron are funny because their stupidity is a grounding contrast to Jimmy's genius. Sheen and Carl humanize Jimmy and give him people to look out for. Patrick Star in the early seasons of Spongebob Squarepants is endearing because Spongebob and Patrick got along so well as friends. They are partners in their hijinks. In later seasons of Spongebob Squarepants, Patrick becomes somewhat of a villain as his unjustifiable bad decisions became the source of conflict for episodes.

The Patrick Star effect: if a character is so stupid for comedic effect that they end up causing more problems, then that makes them unlikable.

 Monsters at Work suffers the same problem. The characters' incompatibility causes more problems in the show than it fixes. 

Earlier in this review, I made a comparison to The Office. The humor of The Office thrives on the characters having awkward interactions. It's funny because it's relatable, not because we enjoy seeing the characters suffer. When Michael Scott forces his employees to do something ridiculous, we laugh because we as the audience understands what it's like to have a superior screw around with us. It's funny because it's true. The magic of The Office is when the characters finally a point of understanding and has a few surprisingly touching moments.

No, Monsters at Work is not the cartoon version of The Office, as much as I wished it were.

Watching Monsters at Work, the character relationships were not relatable and did not make me laugh. It felt awkward in a way that was forced, not earned. 

Monsters at Work isn't funny because it's true. It's unfunny because they're trying to tell us it's funny.

Without giving away too much, the last episode of Monsters at Work redeems some of this, but not in any moments that will make you tear up or feel sad it's over. It's more likely you'll say, "They'd better not make a season two." That's what I definitely said. 

As much as I wanted a show that follows the world and characters of Monsters Inc., Monsters at Work left me feeling bad I ever watched it. There's so much potential for a monster world, but the most we ever got with this show were grating characters with no chemistry and a lot of bad puns. I don't know how to diagnose the problem other than this project was placed in the hands of people who had no passion or originality. For now, I'll continue to think fondly of the Monsters movies and try to forget this show ever existed.

Now Disney+, please, LEAVE THE CARS FRANCHISE ALONE. DON'T MAKE A SHOW TO RUIN MY IDOL LIGHTNING MCQUEEN.