Workaholics: Season 7

Workaholics just finished up its seventh and final season, and not a moment too soon. I think this show has struggled for years now. Of course, this begs the question - was it always really not so funny and pretty stupid, or did I simply outgrow it? I think the problem is that the show didn't grow alongside me, so to speak.

Workaholics debuted in 2011, the same year I was a year out of college and into the workforce, and I absolutely related to the hijinks of three slackers in their twenties treating professional life like a dead end. What's the work week, after all, but the time that passes between the evenings and the weekends? The series peaked early with a Season 2 episode called "Old Man Ders" in which Anders - the oldest of the trio - turns 25 and, sensing that he's getting old, spends the day drunk and making an ass out of himself at a Chuck E. Cheese knockoff, much to the anger of a father there for his own young son's birthday. It's one of the show's funniest episodes, but it also pokes at something deeper - this idea that, at 25, Anders is too old to be acting like a college freshman drinking booze for the first time. "Grow up."

But the show never really did; that Season 2 episode is the closest any of the guys came to accepting, embracing, and adapting to the idea that life can slow down a little as you approach thirty. And don't get me wrong - a show about three roommates who watch Netflix after work and feel like crap after too much pizza and beer would be a terribly unfunny show. But the older these guys got - and the older I got - the sadder it was to see them living like frat bros.

This final season at least started out like it was going to reflect that. The boys' boss calls them out for being in their thirties and still acting like idiots constantly, and a new batch of fresh-out-of-college kids show up as if to really drive home that "you're gettin' old" point. But the newcomers are dispatched in one episode, and the rest of the season unfolded like any other Workaholics year - occasionally funny, always unnecessary, generally lazy. This wasn't as bad as, say, The League got in its final season, when the entire cast and writing staff went full-blown "who the fuck cares?" and burned everything to the ground. But there was no uptick in quality here at the tail end of Workaholics. Oh well! That's Comedy Central for you.