For the record, following a post wondering “Where are all the freelance characters on TV?”, the Freelancers Union* posted an earlier item that tells us that one place to look is the TV show, Broad City [1]. The article, signed by “Trupo” (which is an insurance company partly owned by the FU), discusses the fictional life of the characters. (Caveat: I haven’t watched more than a few minutes of this show myself.)
“The characters don’t explicitly say they are freelancers, but they continue to work side jobs throughout the shows five seasons.”
These two working women live the real life of a freelancer: many gigs, mostly very short term. Intermittent income, no benefits, little security.
The show plays these challenges for comedy, of course. The point is that this is slice-of-life comedy, representing the real experience of a lot of workers living in New York City.
The FU concludes, “hopefully this is just the beginning of a more accurate representation of the growing norm of non-traditional work.”
I don’t know how “normative” or “non-traditional” gig working is, will, or should be. But it’s certainly good to see some realistic fiction about working lives.
As I commented earlier, why not a fictional life set in a coworking space? I have described coworking (and by implication freelancing) as “participatory theater”, in which workers create their own story of the Future of Work. That sounds like a decent scenario for scripted theater.
- Trupo, What Broad City got right about financial insecurity and episodic income, in Freelancers Union Blog, January 31, 2020. https://blog.freelancersunion.org/2020/01/31/what-the-show-broad-city-got-right-about-episodic-income/
*Note: I am a proud member of the FU.
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