Workaholics: Bro Break-Up

Lately, especially with our movie analysis presentations, I noticed we have been touching a lot on the dominant and submissive roles that were mentioned in Holz & Ivory. Suddenly, I began noticing the themes we studied in a lot of relationship dynamics of some of the shows I watch. This week I chose to comment on the Workaholic's episode titled "Friendship Anniversary" because I expected to notice a lot more of how their loving, sometimes homoerotic bromance could be coded into this scheme, especially in an episode I was watching that presented them married to each other. For those who are not familiar with the show, Workaholics is about three best friends who have long since graduated from college but are still working their entry-level telemarketing positions. Although they face the pressure of living through their mid-twenties mediocre life, they have the friendship they share and the weed they smoke to keep them level-headed. In the particular episode that I took interest in, the trio made up of Adam, Blake and Ders, are notified that it is time to renew their lease--marking their seven years of living together. They realize that this means they are now common-law married. As they try to celebrate their "dude marriage" they end up in a three-way lovers' quarrel and instead break up. Of course, by the end of the episode they successfully reconcile but until they do, their relationship is framed in a way that tries to depict their bromance as a legitimate male on male on male bromantic love affair.

Considering the nature of the episode, I expected to see some of the scripts that we have been delving into for homosexual and heterosexual couples. From what we know about Holz & Ivory, for same sex relationships, evidence showed presence of gendered scripts. The mean dominance score for the dominant partner tended to be much higher than his/her counterpart and similar was the finding for the partner with the submissive score (Holz & Ivory, 2009). Although I obviously did not conduct a full length coding strategy, I did expect to see one or two of the characters take on a dominant romantic role while at least one took on the submissive role. However, after watching the episode three times and examining the dynamic that ensued when the characters were in scenes with each other, I could not really find enough legitimate evidence to confidently say that any of the characters displayed outstanding dominant characteristics to where they could be coded as the potential "guy" in the relationship. Instead, I noticed that the three displayed a tendency to be submissive and dominant to an equal degree instead. For example, in the gif above, we can see a part in the episode where they are all aching to let each other know how much they are missing their life partners. However, no one actually goes through with initiating anything (i.e., no one goes through with sending the text). In a similar way, when the fight ensues between the three, they all display equal levels of aggression including throwing food and random objects randomly at each other, giving each other orders, and yelling loudly. However, neither of the three stood out as more dominant than the other two.

Although it could be argued that my interpretation is subjective and that there are indeed traces of evidence that would align one with a more dominant script, overall I think that the important take away is that this type of media representation of bromance is important for the context of representation of men overall in media. The fact that their relationship is shown to be taken to such an extent to where they are even happy to be married to each other (before their fight) says a lot about the potential for men to be in touch with their emotions in a way that may not be consistent with traditional media. Perhaps the fact that the show really frames them as "bros" is one reason why they wouldn't be gendered in a way that is inconsistent with that portrayal (i.e. gendered in a more feminine way). However, it would be interesting to look into bromances and how they are adding to a new context of representation of men in media since this is not the first or only portrayal of bromance. Other examples that come to mind are Mac and Dennis from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (who actually also "break up") in one episode. It would be interesting to see what shows and relationship portrayals like these will do for same sex relationship dynamics on and off the screen in the future, whether it be sexual, romantic, or neither.

References 

Holz Ivory, A., Gibson, R., & Ivory, J. D. (2009). Gendered relationships on television: Portrayals of same-sex and heterosexual couples. Mass Communication and Society, 12(2), 170-192.