The premise of this show is that the older Gen X lead who has spent his life as a rugged outdoors-man and head of a print magazine about same is trying to join and understand the modern world with the help of a team of Millennials.
The actuality made brutally obvious by the writing, dialogue, and scene setups is that Millennials are the savvy and modern now-and-future, and Gen X is old, technologically illiterate, increasingly incapable of understanding the processes of the digital world in which we live, and generally clueless about the modern world.
Aside from the fact that none of these things are true about Gen X, this show is part of an accelerating trend in which the same kinds of shows and tropes once employed with characters 15 or 20 years older are being applied to Gen X.
(For those of you not certain, or who have seen some of the crazier definitions of Gen X, the broad conception of the generation is that it's between the ages of 35 and 50. The actor playing the lead is just 45. In fact, over 15 million "Millennials" today were for quite some time Gen X until later efforts from within the advertising and marketing sectors fed into broadly-adopted changes in the generational definitions, producing a "largest generation" by shifting millions from the "Gen X" cohort and into "Millennials".)
And while Millennials come in for the standard-issue digs in the show, they mean little for two reasons perpetuated by the show itself: 1) Millennials are "young", "on the rise" and capable of "improving"; and 2) The knocks come from "old" people who are in clueless, incapable of growing intellectually and achieving new heights, and are in terminal decline.
Gen X has sat largely mute and unacknowledged for while the world speaks only of Boomers (and now Millennials), and now suddenly when we exist we're portrayed ... like this.
The actuality made brutally obvious by the writing, dialogue, and scene setups is that Millennials are the savvy and modern now-and-future, and Gen X is old, technologically illiterate, increasingly incapable of understanding the processes of the digital world in which we live, and generally clueless about the modern world.
Aside from the fact that none of these things are true about Gen X, this show is part of an accelerating trend in which the same kinds of shows and tropes once employed with characters 15 or 20 years older are being applied to Gen X.
(For those of you not certain, or who have seen some of the crazier definitions of Gen X, the broad conception of the generation is that it's between the ages of 35 and 50. The actor playing the lead is just 45. In fact, over 15 million "Millennials" today were for quite some time Gen X until later efforts from within the advertising and marketing sectors fed into broadly-adopted changes in the generational definitions, producing a "largest generation" by shifting millions from the "Gen X" cohort and into "Millennials".)
And while Millennials come in for the standard-issue digs in the show, they mean little for two reasons perpetuated by the show itself: 1) Millennials are "young", "on the rise" and capable of "improving"; and 2) The knocks come from "old" people who are in clueless, incapable of growing intellectually and achieving new heights, and are in terminal decline.
Gen X has sat largely mute and unacknowledged for while the world speaks only of Boomers (and now Millennials), and now suddenly when we exist we're portrayed ... like this.