In the season five premiere of Workaholics, set to air Wednesday night, Ders, Blake and Adam head back to school as TelAmeriCorp recruits in a job fair. As is to be expected, Ders, the responsible one, ends up holding down TelAmeriCorp’s booth alone, as Blake and Adam set about campus for mischief.
Despite the university setting, the big focus of the episode is Adam’s neurotic obsession with pornography. The campus of North Rancho College that they visit happens to be where “24 of his favorite 36” college-themed adult films were set. The depraved character has something of an endearing passion for smut, describing in vivid detail the distorted images that he deems “beautiful.”
The highlight of the episode is Adam getting schooled in the nuances of feminism. Allured to a women and gender studies lecture after spotting a student carrying a book titled “Female Sexuality,” Adam gets called to the front and cross examined about his glorification of the adult film industry. Breaking from the tried and tired genital jokes so often used in blue humor, this scene places depravity under a spotlight, with Adam representing perhaps the most delusional embodiment of male perversion.
At the same time, Blake is trying to revive a long lost passion for theater acting that he once had in high school. Limited to his inauthentic impersonation of an Australian, he finds the college theater scene unwelcoming. His feelings of inadequacy and his wanderings about campus lead him down the road of sexual exploitation that Adam is beginning to understand more deeply.
All the while, Ders is left competing with the U.S. Coast Guard for college-age recruits. He isn’t successful in enticing the students until he takes jabs at the oft-ignored military branch. Questioning the vague responsibilities of the Coast Guard, his barrage of cracks is only trounced by the USCG’s dogged plot for humiliating revenge.
The episode posits the three partying, college-dropout telemarketers in the serious context of sexism and converts their ignorance and perversions into satire. Adam’s porn fascination is used to highlight and scrutinize the brashest brand of misogyny. The only way to reach him, it appears, is to use that same language of misogyny against itself.
As far as season premiers go, this one rolls the debauchery right out of the bag. This season of Workaholics looks to hide nothing; no topic deserves sensitivity. And for better or worse, the laughs come out of dropped jaws and wincing eyes when bawdy scene after bawdy scene pricks your funny bone into discomfort.