THE PROPHET JOB had a hard life, but I think even he, if listening to Abby’s story, would say, “Damn.”
He’s not listening to her troubles, though: Abby’s therapist is. No, wait, she’s not listening either, for a reason that will spur Abby’s friends to joke about just how sad Abby’s life really is.
I’m describing Work in Progress, a scripted comedy produced by Showtime and co-written by Tim Mason, Lilly Wachowski (The Matrix, Sense 8), and Abby McEnany, who stars as a fictionalized version of herself.
“Abby is a mid-forties self-identified queer dyke whose life is a quiet and ongoing crisis,” Showtime’s website describes, not revealing that Abby lives with OCD, washing her hands repeatedly and recording her life meticulously in notebooks, in case she forgets anything she’s ever done. It doesn’t reveal that Abby, throughout much of her life, has been called Pat—a reference to the Saturday Night Live character from the early ’90s—and is often mistaken for a man, asked to leave public bathrooms, and struggles with her weight. It certainly doesn’t reveal what we learn in the first few minutes of Work in Progress: In a couple of weeks, if Abby’s life doesn’t get better, she plans to take her own life.
Work in Progress orbits a dark hole of clinical depression, but it’s hilarious, containing meta elements like SNL alum Julia Sweeney playing a version of herself, apologetic for how her character Pat negatively affected Abby’s life and eager to make it up; a brother-in-law who has a Kenny Loggins cover band called Danger Zone; a therapist who gives new meaning to the phrase “nevertheless, she persisted”; and a nun who just wants to see Dolly Parton in concert.
Work in Progress also features a trans man as a romantic lead, as well as several other queer characters, and allows Abby to be an imperfect queer woman surviving oppressive systems but also inflicting great pain herself.
The show is filming its second season—which, I guess, (spoiler alert) tells you something about whether Abby will decide to live. I wonder if it will incorporate COVID-19, which would likely be her biggest obstacle thus far. Several scripted television series already have their characters dealing with COVID-19 while we suffer through it ourselves, but, apart from the OWN Network’s Queen Sugar—which has a largely Black cast and a strong racial justice focus—none of the shows are as perfectly poised to consider this moment as Work in Progress.
For now, though, we have just these eight episodes of superb television. I think Job, if he were here, would be a huge fan.
Da’Shawn Mosley (dashawn-mosley.com) is a former Sojourners associate editor and lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
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