“Breaking In”: The secret behind TV’s obnoxious male leads

Christian Slater's new show is the latest to double as a fawning tribute to the Hollywood boss who approved it

By Matt Zoller Seitz

Christian Slater stars as the great and powerful Oz in Fox's caper comedy "Breaking In."

If you’ve ever asked yourself why so many TV shows and movies glorify people who strut around growling orders and insulting underlings and barking, “Think, people! Think!” and otherwise acting like insufferable jerks, you’ve never spent any time in Los Angeles. Hollywood is a dream factory run mostly by and for raging narcissists with power and money. Its mass-produced dreams are overseen by people who want to be constantly reassured that they’re talented, sexy, charismatic warrior-poet visionaries, and that you can absorb such invaluable knowledge by being around them that the abuse they heap on you is totally worth it. That’s why the preferred dramatic configuration of ensemble TV shows is the ragtag band of eccentric professionals (read as: creative types), led by a well-dressed, middle-aged boss who reflexively needles and insults people and throws temper tantrums and sometimes puts on an expensive jacket and sunglasses, hops in his expensive car or on his expensive motorcycle, and takes off for parts unknown without warning, forcing underlings to wonder where the hell he is and talk about him nonstop until he reappears unannounced and provides them with the final piece of whatever puzzle they were trying to solve in his absence. These shows exist to kiss the asses of people who approve shows.

“I’m glad you’re back, boss,” the underling will say. “There’s no time for that!” the boss will say, cutting him off, firing up one of those gigantic wall-mounted display screens that are all the rage on crime shows these days, and pointing to a crucial detail the rest of the team overlooked because they’re not as awesome as he is. “Hah! I knew it! ‘Tribal nil’ is an anagram for ‘brilliant’!”

The autocratic mentor-leader with no time for pleasantries is a masturbation fantasy of super-rich producers, directors, studio executives and network suits. The archetype keeps showing up on-screen because it’s an easy way to stroke the ego of a boss who’s not very smart or self-aware. (“See, the FBI team is headed by this handsome, mysterious, brilliant guy in his 40s with this young, hot girlfriend …” “I like it!”) Roughly a third of CBS’ prime-time lineup and a lot of Fox’s has a Hollywood boss surrogate as its hero, and pretty much every other network and cable channel has its own versions scattered throughout the schedule. Laurence Fishburne on “CSI,” Gary Sinise on “CSI: New York,” David Caruso on “CSI: Miami,” Forest Whitaker on “Criminal Intent: Suspect Behavior,” Tim Roth on “Lie to Me,” Hugh Laurie on “House” — the list of examples is endless. Some of these guys have three dimensions (House is an especially well-drawn character), while others have maybe one-and-a-half.

Why am I griping about Hollywood power-trippers and their poisonous effect on pop culture? Because it’s more fun than writing about “Breaking In” (9:30 p.m. Wednesdays/8:30 Central), the mediocre, plastic, utterly false new comedy premiering on Fox tonight — a series that just happens to be built around an all-powerful alpha male jerkwad character.

Publicity materials describe “Breaking In” as “an offbeat half-hour workplace comedy about a high-tech security firm that takes extreme — and often questionable — measures to sell their protection services. Created by Adam F. Goldberg and Seth Gordon, the series centers on a team of uniquely skilled oddball geniuses hand-picked to work for a manipulative mastermind.” The mastermind in question is known as Oz (get it?), and he’s played by Christian Slater in that tiresome, vaguely lizard-y, fast talking mode that has been his stock-in-trade for a quarter century.

Oz appears mysteriously (of course) in the dorm room of a college hacker and hustler named Cameron Price (Bret Harrison). “Have a seat, there, champ,” he says, startling Cameron, who had no idea he was even in the room.

“Who the hell are you?” Cameron sputters.

“I’m the guy telling you to sit your ass down, that’s who I am,” Oz replies. He’s wearing sunglasses indoors. And he’s got a cigar.

The plot, such as it is, has Oz and his team testing security for a luxury car dealership by trying to steal a car from its showroom. The team includes a hot chick who can pick locks (say that five times fast) and a pop culture addict who makes his entrance dressed as Han Solo. There’s a mildly funny twist at the 20-minute mark, preceded by lots of jokes that would only make a Hollywood jerk laugh (luxury cars described as “panty droppers,” the hero being casually threatened with prison rape and so forth). Yawn.

The supposedly great and powerful Oz has no discernible inner (or outer) life. He’s just a fantasy of mastery, boring and empty even by the standards of half-hour escapist comedy. The only touch that seems halfway human is his fascination with ordering merchandise from Sky Mall; how much you wanna bet that detail was lifted from whoever the show’s creators needed to ego-stroke in order to get a green light for “Breaking In”?

This is the sort of show networks put on the air when they’ve got nothing else. I hope whoever said yes to it is happy.

: More Matt Zoller Seitz

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Jennifer Aniston, Jason Bateman and Kevin Spacey star in this surprisingly likable comedy about employee revenge

By Andrew O'Hehir

Jason Bateman and Kevin Spacey in "Horrible Bosses"

Topics:Horrible Bosses, Breaking In, Colin Farrell, Jennifer Aniston, The Office, Movies

As inconsequential and virtually indistinguishable sub-Judd Apatow white-boy comedies fueled by prison-rape gags and pants-pissing anxiety around black people go, “Horrible Bosses” is pretty solid entertainment. Did you notice how I adjusted the bar there? It actually took a female colleague to nudge me gently toward the glaringly obvious fact that “Horrible Bosses” recycles its plot from the 1980 hit “Nine to Five” with the feminism drained out of it, which is to say its entire reason for existing is gone. “Horrible Bosses” has no meaning or purpose whatever, but it does have Colin Farrell with a bad comb-over, Kevin Spacey acting really mean and Jennifer Aniston as a spray-tanned sex maniac, and that’s going to have to do.

I get complaints from some of you when I go off on irrelevant tangents about the Decline of Culture and the Meaninglessness of Everything that really don’t have anything to do with some very nice, very rich people from Los Angeles who are working as hard as they can to make the same movies over and over again that you may laugh. In recognition of those nice people and our shared admiration of their labor, let’s divide this review into useful and nonuseful portions. Here’s what you need to know: “Horrible Bosses” is a lot funnier in theory than in practice, but it won’t ruin your Saturday night. As the trio of put-upon nitwits who decide to rid the world of their respective employers, Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis have an enjoyable and effortless comic chemistry. They even seem to like each other, and whether or not that’s faked it’s a key element of ensemble comedy. The cast of “The Hangover Part II” seemed massively irritated with each other’s company the entire time, and the bad vibes between Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis in “Due Date” permeated the entire production with a funky, bad odor, like bong-water and old socks mixed with spoiled sweet-and-sour chicken.

It’s a very good thing that those three guys cutting up, mocking each other and getting into embarrassing scrapes is fun to watch, because the script they’re reading (credited to Michael Markowitz, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein) is miscellaneous nonsense, and implausible even by the standards of who-cares Hollywood absurdity. To me, Bateman is the star here as much as he was opposite Aniston in last summer’s mediocre rom-com “The Switch,” where he totally stole the show. He never overplays even the stupidest comic situation, delivers a deadpan comeback with the best of them, and never compromises his basic likability. He plays Nick, a financial professional who’s way more successful than his buddies but is being sadistically strung along by Dave Harken (Spacey), his manipulative, micro-managing boss.

If Spacey starts out deliciously, in full-on flaming-driven-asshole mode, before Dave dissolves into an unconvincingly dumb cascade of evil, Farrell and Aniston’s horrible bosses never remotely resemble real people. Maybe that’s not a bad thing in itself; it’s not like director Seth Gordon (who made “Four Christmases,” along with episodes of “The Office,” “Parks and Recreation” and “Breaking In”) is pushing toward ruthless realism in this relentlessly sitcommy picture. Farrell plays a cokehead degenerate who’s using the small-time chemical company where Kurt (Sudeikis) works as his personal ATM, and that’s a whole bunch of shtick that never goes anywhere.

Aniston, as you may have heard, plays a leggy dentist with a fetching brunette ‘do and a deep stem-to-stern studio tan who craves a little personal attention from Dale (Day), her nerdy, nervous assistant, and won’t take no for an answer. There are so many things to say about this that I don’t know where to start, but, oh yeah, we’re still supposed to be in the useful portion of the review: Aniston might not seem like an automatic choice for this kind of slutty, man-eater role, but she’s ingratiating, funny and medium-sexy, and seems to enjoy herself far more than she ever has playing an anxious, boring sweetheart in romantic comedies.

That said — and here’s where we cross into nonuseful territory — Aniston’s psycho-bitch DDS character is just one of the countless ways that “Horrible Bosses” flirts with troubling or forbidden subject matter while still reassuring its youngish male target demographic as to their masculine coolness. Of course it’s possible for a female boss to sexually harass a male employee. In fact, I’m sure it has happened — in, like, 0.1 percent of harassment cases — but the perpetrator has rarely (or more likely never) resembled Jennifer Aniston. I hardly need to point out that mainstream filmmakers aren’t going to cast a fat woman or a much older woman or a woman who isn’t conventionally attractive in that role, because it wouldn’t be titillating and it would make them look like sexist creeps. In fact, Aniston’s character in “Horrible Bosses” goes well beyond unethical or inappropriate conduct into felonious sexual assault, but it all stays within the realm of comedy because A) it’s ridiculous and B) she’s hot.

I suppose it’s true that Nick, Kurt and Dale hatch a homicidal plan, only it’s more like they have a bunch of Three Stooges misadventures on the road toward having a plan, which involve Kurt sticking a toothbrush up his butt while the other two accidentally ingest loads of cocaine. They also travel into a scary neighborhood (i.e., one where African-Americans live) and meet a guy with a shaved head, prison tattoos and a pseudo-intellectual goatee whose name is Motherfucker Jones (Jamie Foxx). It’s a throwaway role for Foxx, but he gets to play a racist caricature and subvert the white boys’ instinctive racism at the same time, while delivering life lessons drawn from Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train” and the 1999 Ethan Hawke vehicle “Snow Falling on Cedars.” (“I love that movie!” Sudeikis says brightly.)

This tiptoe-dance around racial attitudes is reflected in the film’s attitude about homosexuality, which is to dude comedy as that big-ass iceberg was to the Titanic — disastrous but also irresistible. (I won’t spoil a weird cameo appearance by Ioan Gruffudd, but it’s definitely on topic.) Sudeikis’ character is supposed to be an inveterate lady-killer who bags any chick he wants (which doesn’t seem likely, but never mind), but he catches himself checking out another guy’s butt in a big-box store, and becomes embroiled in a running debate with Bateman’s character about which of them will be more “rape-able” if they end up in prison. This is at least the fifth guy-comedy I’ve seen in the last year to mine the ever-hilarious topic of prison rape for laughs, and in its own screwy, accidental way maybe “Horrible Bosses” is taking on the ambivalent, narcissistic quality of post-metrosexual masculinity. No self-respecting straight guy wants to go to prison and become somebody’s bitch (except for the protagonist of David Mamet’s “Edmond”), but it would be even worse to go to prison and be ignored.