The premise couldn't be more appetizing. You work up there, in Heaven, with God, who is a white-bearded, skinny, no-big guy (Steve Buscemi). You have a precarious and seemingly unnecessary, ridiculous job. You answer prayers. Miracle works. But they're small. Someone asks not to be late somewhere, or to have locked the door when leaving. Minuscule stuff. There are countless miracles going on all the time, and you can't keep up, so you always have the feeling that you're not doing it right, or that you could do better, when what happens is that your work is infinite and you're never going to finish anything. Sound familiar? Miracle Workers (WarnerTV) is not just a small miracle of the fantastic-tinged comedy — which just premiered its fourth season — but a scourge to the suffocation of life on Earth in this 21st century.
Because, yes, the afterlife of the first season – the best of all, the one that should go down in the small history of television as a fortunate deviation from the system – is reflecting the useless and psychotic contemporary overproduction – Up There is produced without rhyme or reason, miracles accumulate hopelessly and there is only an overexploited angel carelessly giving them an outlet. and its more than likely end with the end of the world. Because God is sick of so much work—actually, he's going through everything—and he doesn't even remember why He created this busily impossible planet, so He's going to destroy it. And what can the protagonist (none other than Daniel Radcliffe, completely devoted to comedy after Harry Potter) do to avoid it? What can any worker do in the face of a boss who is as powerful as he is incompetent?
Daniel Radcliffe, in the fourth season of 'Miracle Workers'. Jeremy Freeman
Miracle Workers is based on a series of novels by the hilarious Pixar screenwriter Simon Rich —still to be translated in Spain, which would explain how unfortunate such a recommendable experiment has been—, and its problem is that the only thing it keeps intact is the anti-system spirit. That is to say, each season is a ridiculous diatribe against the world, played by the same actors in very different roles, but the place and time in which that diatribe takes place is always different. Because the issue of miracles in the title — Miracle Workers would mean in the context something like Miracle Workersor Miracle Workers — is limited, unfortunately, to the first season. In the second they move to the Middle Ages, in the third, to the Wild West and in the fourth, to a dystopian future, in every possible sense. In all these worlds, there is someone, however, working more than necessary, and not being recognized at all for it.
The genius of the starting point is sustained in each of the other seasons – among which the second is perhaps the most dispensable – from a more or less appetizing premise: the trip to Oregon with caravans and horses – the desacralization of the American myth par excellence: the western – or an unseen future. The latter is what happens in the curious last season, in which John Cheever suburban life is imitated in the middle of the Mad Max dystopia, or what happens when you go to dinner with your boss and your wife – who is a murderous housewife – dressed in the button-down uniform worn by the corpse of a machinist. No, in the future, as in the present, there is no one behind the wheel, although there is one constant: that those who work hard are the ones who work, and those who work passionately and innocently excessively.
You can follow EL PAÍS Televisión on X or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Read more
I'm already a subscriber
_