Minimum Wage Is Coming for Your Office Rewatch
Grace plays Grace. Aidan plays Aidan. Ryan plays Ryan. There is something immediately endearing about a sitcom cast apparently deciding that learning seven new first names would be unnecessary admin. Minimum Wage keeps the names of its central seven performers, and that small detail is a good place to begin our pitch: this is the best thing since The Office.
For the record, Hyde, Julia, Luke and Tommy keep theirs too. Randall Park, playing Mr Sylvester, is the exception. Still, the names invite a question worth asking before you press play: who are these people, and how did they end up behind the same pizza counter?
They had already been making comedy together. Minimum Wage grew out of American High Shorts, whose performers helped write the original web episodes around characters developed for them. The cast came to Netflix with a working relationship and material they had helped build. That makes this a rather more appealing proposition than another workplace sitcom assembled around a familiar guest star.
The early shoot sounds exhausting. A local pizzeria lent them the premises after closing; they filmed overnight, with interns operating cameras. In their own podcast, brothers Aidan and Ryan Micho recall the real restaurant staff arriving in the morning and waiting for filming to finish. Imagine coming in to do your actual pizza-shop shift and finding the pretend employees still at work.
Even the co-creator has a pleasingly ungrand account of his contribution. Jeremy Garelick joked to Inc about joining an experiment that was already going well:
The Netflix production eventually got its own home: a former barbecue restaurant in Liverpool, near Syracuse, converted into the fictional Slice Club. A sitcom does not need a spectacular address; it needs people you want to spend another quarter of an hour with.
That is the Office comparison we care about. The appeal of returning to Scranton is knowing the people so well that simply putting two of them in a room feels promising. Minimum Wage has an unusually good head start on that kind of familiarity: its ensemble was making things together before most viewers knew their names. The fact that you only have to learn those names once is a bonus.
Netflix has fourteen episodes available, with a twenty-minute opener and shorter instalments after it. Start with the first one. Leave the episode descriptions alone, let the jokes arrive unannounced, and give the pizza shop the evening you were about to spend back at the paper company.
