Now comes Marty Kaan (Don Cheadle), the ruthless management consultant who, together with his younger team members, would stop at nothing to rake more billable hours and expenses into their employer's purse. To make the main characters more or less palatable to the audience, and at times even lovable and pitiful, the show goes beyond the beaten path of showing their human side in personal situations – it pitches them against the somewhat two-dimensional, but decisively abhorrent, cast of clients who, in the viewers' minds, "deserve" to be taken advantage of, if for no other reason but to restore the sense of "social justice."
This means that the show doesn't go after small businesses – that could be risky as the viewers might feel compassion for the struggling owners, and, more importantly, it would demand from them a sufficient familiarity with commercial specifics. Moreover, even people with no exposure to actual business activities understand that no small company can afford Marty's team's first-class airfare and stretch-SUV limos.
In fact, the clients are all large businesses that seem to be plucked out of the media coverage, which makes them not just the Big Bad Wolves, but the familiar ones as well. These are the entities that, at the very least, come into the peripheral vision of the general public. You've got your proverbial bank, tainted by sub-prime mortgages and riding the bailout wave; an obnoxious teenage high-tech billionaire; a national budget-hotel chain helmed by racist Mormons, etc.
Not-businessy people ask me if the show reflects the reality of the every-day business life. My answer is, "No." And it's not because there are no consulting firms, businesses, engagements, and people like the ones we see in the show, or that the writers get the terminology wrong. Actually they get a lot of things right and I wouldn't be surprised if the writing staff compiled by Matthew Carnahan for this show has at least a few people with MBA's in their past. At times they even go too far in their realism: I wonder, for example, what percentage of the audience understands what KPI's are.
The reason the show has nothing to do with the life most business people live is that the Big Business's actual existence is unreal and makes no common sense. Their paper-financed operations, the influence on the government, the executive compensations, the excessive spenditures on… mmm… everything, the actions they get away with – they are surreal and grotesque. But, I guess, that makes it even more fitting for entertainment purposes.
That said, there were a few observations within the first 5 episodes of the show that not only rang very true to my ears, but some were already addressed in this blog's posts:
1. Within the first 10 minutes of the pilot, Marty explains to the audience how the "afterwork" is attained: make them feel like their business is going to fail without you and tons of billable hours will be generated (see 05/14/2011 post Case Study: The Marketing of Fear).
2. The member of Kaan's team responsible for crunching numbers and analyzing clients' financials looks timidly and acts awkwardly in social situations, representing the classical Hollywood stereotype of an accounting professional (see 10/26/2010 post He Looks Like an Accountant…).
3. The core substance of dynamics between various CEOs and CFOs so frequently discussed here (just go to the "Bosses" category) is accurately captured in a very schematic way, which actually manages to make it almost biblical in its generality: a prim-spined, heartless bully, bent on doing the things his way, whether it's good for the business or not (the Boss), on one side and a somewhat hunched, practical, reasonable, subordinate, but still powerful in his own sneaky way schemer (CFO) on the other.
4. Finally, the ultimate truth I have an occasion to repeat at least once every day: everything in this world is a matter of perception, or, as Marty Kaan puts it, "Data dump is the key; everything else is horseshit, except PERCEPTION, which is horseshit you can leverage."
The Frustrated CFO 