Overview
New hires Robert and Phil must serve customers until one of them dies to see who can get hired at minimum wage.
Our Take
You may remember a Comedy Central shorts series called Super IT Squad created by Mike Manor a couple of years back, a workplace comedy that was very much like a 16-bit animated adaptation of The Office. Welp, Mike is back, this time with the folks at Adult Swim for a new short inspired by the hard workers of Los Angeles that work in the quick services industries, this one called Beantown: Trial By Fire.
Beantown is another workplace comedy from Manor, but this one’s a bit different because we’re in a coffee shop setting and not like one of the nice ones but clearly a pastiche of Starbucks though highly stylized to showcase the madness that goes on when Starbucks gets really busy.
The series is none too dissimilar to Smiling Friends in that the workplace comedy motif is quickly thrown out the window and instead we get to see what a Starbucks would look like if it went through the tunnels of the Wonka Factory. Featuring voice work from the likes of Chris Fleming, Rachel Kaly, Mandal, Derek Simpson, and Mike Manor, this might be Manor’s finest work yet in terms of art direction where instead of getting the all-too-familiar montage of sprites, Mike really goes the extra mile in the action direction department and the results are nothing less than stellar. Here’s hoping more is on the way, as this has all the makings of the next quarter-hour classic for Adult Swim.