Ever Hate Your Job? You’ll Probably Love Jack in a Box

If you were to break down the entirety of scripted web video into two categories — shows about jobs that stink, and shows that aren’t about jobs that stink — you’d probably have a lot more of the former than the latter. Everyone spends a fair amount of time kvetching about work, after all, and finding a new venue to do so (under the guise of fiction, no less!) is probably a welcome release for most creators. The challenge is making that interesting to the average viewer, especially one who exists outside the specific community in which the job takes place. And that’s where the indie series Jack in a Box really excels.

Created by Marcie Hume and Michael Cyril Creighton, Jack in a Box tells the story of Jack (Creighton), an aspiring actor whose aspirations have been dampened over the past several years by his low-level day job in a Broadway ticket office — leaving him a cupcake-devouring, chain-smoking shell of a man who never misses an opportunity to get even the smallest amount of petty revenge on the world.

The jokes are relatively particular to the New York theater scene as a result, but even someone who couldn’t find 42nd Street on an NYC street map will enjoy the bitchy way in which Jack deals with annoying customers and actors who are much more successful than him, just as long as they’ve ever attended a theater production or worked a job they honestly didn’t care about getting fired from. The budget is clearly low but the production values manage to be relatively solid despite that, and Creighton, as the writer and lead, gives the show a clear voice that has found some audience — with relatively minimal distribution and promotional push, each episode has earned over 1,000 YouTube views.

Over the nine episodes released since the show’s premiere in July 2009, Jack’s quest to escape the box office has escalated. But no matter what he does, his fate seems sadly sealed, a profound warning to those who might give up on their dreams — or just “put them on hold” for a little while.

The most truthful moment of the show comes in Episode 3, where Jack’s job performance is brutally evaluated by his boss Becca (Beth Cole). When she critiques his goofing off, his inability to show up on time and his bad attitude, he asks her if he’s ever going to get health insurance. She says no, he replies that in that case, things are never going to change — and then the two of them go smoke a cigarette, together resigned.

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