Many reviewers rightfully excoriated the new ABC sit-com Work It. For example, there’s Alan Sepinwall, James Poniewozik, Maureen Ryan, Todd VanDerWerff, and Alyssa Rosenberg, to name a few. Most of the focus was on how the show views women (insultingly), and I didn’t see much about the racism of the pilot (lead character Angel Ortiz says, “I’m Puerto Rican. I’ll be great at selling drugs.”), but lots of good points were made about why the pilot episode was so terrible.
But there was one thing I think was missed. Is the show terrible because it’s about cross-dressing heterosexual men? Does that sort of storyline not work any more?
Most of the news coverage pointed out that the show is a lot like Bosom Buddies, the ABC sit-com from the early Eighties. There’s also the movie Tootsie (1982) and Some Like It Hot (1959). What’s different about Work It?
Let’s also thrown in Monty Python, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in some of the Road pictures, Victor/Victoria, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Birdcage, Dame Edna Everage, and Divine. With that large sample size, what stands out to me is that there are different forms of cross-dressing. In something like the play Charley’s Aunt, the main character dresses as a woman, but the story has nothing to do with gender roles. It’s simply a costume. Other times, it’s simply a man playing a female character (we’re meant to focus on the character, not the man playing her). Still other occasions, it’s about a drag queen practicing her craft.
But in certain works, it’s about a man stepping into the role of a woman. In the best of these, like Tootsie and Some Like It Hot, the character is really required to submerge themselves into the role. This results in them learning things about themselves as men and about what it’s like to be a woman.
But in Work It, the two lead characters are forced to pass as woman because they’re unable to live as productive men. They can’t get jobs, part of their identity as men. They’ve been marginalized by the women of the world. And even though they’re disguised, the show wants to make it really clear that they’re still men – dammit!
A lot of transgender groups have complained about the show and it’s clear why. Take a look at the promotional photo above. That’s not an image of two women, that nobody suspects are secretly men. That’s two dudes in dresses, using the men’s urinal.
To do the story, and do it properly, you’d have to have the character commit. He would have to submerge himself into life as a woman. He would have to look and act as feminine as possible, in order to make his scheme work.
Work It seems to want to stay as far away from that as possible.