Comedy Central’s Corporate Proves Just How Talented Lance Reddick Was
Screenshot via YouTube
When character actor Lance Reddick unexpectedly died at the age of 60 on March 17, television and film fans weren’t just mourning the man who’d embodied The Wire’s Lieutenant Daniels and Broyles on Fringe. Over the past 20-plus years, Reddick had proven himself game for just about anything on screen. His rich baritone and natural stature often got him cast as stiff-shirt, seemingly upstanding authority figures. But as he acknowledged to The AV Club in 2008, he had a lot of range even in drama school. He may have been known best in pop culture for “My office” bosses, but he avoided typecasting in part thanks to his incredible understanding of body language and large, expressive eyes. The actor was as good at playing desperation and terror as he was offering warmth and steely gravitas. (If anyone said to me “You’re a piece of shit” the way he does McNulty, I’d simply flee the room.)
After all, anybody who was watching cable television in the 2010s, including Always Sunny and the Fringe where Broyles accidentally takes acid, knows Reddick was funny. He could be down to earth in a small part on Key & Peele, but he sank his teeth into the weirdness of Comedy Bang Bang and Adult Swim spots, clearly relishing the chance to show his over-the-top side to curious stoners surfing Xfinity. Nowhere was this more evident than in his role as Christian DeVille (yes, that’s correct) on the underrated Comedy Central series Corporate.
The sitcom only aired from 2018 to 2020, and had at best pretty lousy ratings. But as a temp employee at the time, the first season of Corporate was like tasting a strong, solid beer after a crappy work day. I’d rarely seen the casually bleak, fatalistic conversations my friends and I had about neoliberal life actually depicted on TV. Broad City tried and still wildly misread its audience by fawning over Hillary Clinton. Yet here were these depressed office employees Jake (Jake Weisman) and Matt (Matt Ingrebretson) saying things like “In the end, I’d rather be stuck in a dead-end job and a one bedroom than chase my dreams in a studio.” The sage response: “Capitalism is a prison.” It was funny and even exciting, though subsequent seasons couldn’t quite match the venom of the initial first 10 episodes.