The premise couldn’t be more appetizing. You work up there, in heaven, with God, a man with a white beard, skinny, no big deal (Steve Buscemi). You have a precarious and seemingly unnecessary, ridiculous job. They answer prayers. Works wonders. But they are small. Someone asks not to be late somewhere or to have the door locked when leaving. Tiny things. There are countless miracles being printed all the time and you can’t keep up, so you always feel like you’re not doing it well or that you could do it better, while your work is endless and you’ll never get anything done. Does it sound familiar? “Miracle Workers” (WarnerTV) is not only a minor comedy marvel with fantastical undertones – the fourth season of which just premiered – but also a scourge of the oppressive nature of life on Earth in the 21st century.
Because yes, the Beyond of the first season – the best of all, which should go down in the little history of television as a happy detour of the system – reflects the useless and psychotic contemporary overproduction without which Ahi Arriba is produced. They aren’t nonsense either, The miracles accumulate without any remedy and there is only one over-exploited angel who carelessly passes them on – and their more than likely end with the end of the world. Because God is tired of so much work – in fact, he’s having the time of his life – and he doesn’t even remember why he created this impossible, busy planet, so he’s going to destroy it. And what can the protagonist (none other than Daniel Radcliffe, who dedicated himself entirely to comedy after Harry Potter) do to avoid this? What can a worker do in the face of a boss who is both omnipotent and incompetent?
Daniel Radcliffe, in the fourth season of “Miracle Workers.” Jeremy Freeman
Miracle Workers is based on a series of novels by the hilarious Pixar screenwriter Simon Rich – which have yet to be translated in Spain, which would explain why such a commendable experiment has gone unnoticed – and its problem is that the only thing left intact , which is anti-system spirit. . That is, each season is a hilarious diatribe against the world, played by the same actors in very different roles, but the place and time in which that diatribe takes place is always different. Because the theme of miracles in the title – Miracle Workers in this context would mean something like Currantes del Milagro or Currantes Milagrosos – is unfortunately limited to the first season. The second takes us to the Middle Ages, the third to the Far West and the fourth to a future that is dystopian in every respect. In all of these worlds there is someone who works more than necessary and is not recognized for it at all.
The ingenuity of the starting point is maintained in each of the other seasons – of which the second is perhaps the most expendable – by a more or less appealing premise: the journey to Oregon with caravan and horses – the desacralization of the American myth par excellence: the West – or one unprecedented future. The latter happens in the strange final season, which recreates John Cheever-style suburban life in the middle of the Mad Max dystopia, or what happens when you go to dinner with your boss and your wife – who is a housewife – in a murder house – dressed in the bellboy uniform carrying the corpse of a train driver. No, in the future as in the present, no one is at the wheel, although there is one constant: losers are those who work and those who work passionately and innocently to excess.
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