Fired on Mars

Our Review

The bleakest, funniest cartoon about corporate life ever made: Jeff Cooper, a graphic designer at Mars Corp’s Martian colony, gets fired the day after arriving — and, with a return ticket two years away, has to survive as the only unemployed man on Mars. It’s Office Space in space: HR meetings about feelings on a dead planet, a company store monopoly on everything, nihilistic gym-bro coworkers, and Jeff’s slow, medicated spiral into making art again because there’s literally nothing else.

The bleak, flat animation style makes Mars a character: indifferent, red, silent. Ben Cook voices Jeff with perfect deadened affect, and the voice cast brings the colony’s quiet desperation alive. It’s short (eight episodes), complete, and genuinely one of the most original animated shows of the decade — the opposite of space opera: space as a cubicle. Canceled after one season, which is almost thematically appropriate.

Verdict: Watch it. A pink slip on the red planet — and it slaps.