Think Your Job Sucks? New MTV Show Profiles Strange and Awesome Career Paths MTV's new series, which profiles snake venom milkers, beer keg inventors and junk food bloggers, represents the network's first foray into business-centric content.
By Geoff Weiss
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MTV's programming department is eager to ratify what our community has long been aware: "Entrepreneurs are the rock stars of this generation."
So says Paul Ricci, executive producer of Jobs That Don't Suck, a brand new half-hour comedy series on MTV2 that will examine millennial business prodigies as seen through an "irreverent" lens. It debuts tomorrow at 11:30 p.m.
While the show will profile provocative career paths (like snake venom milker) and eye-opening inventions (like a beer keg that cuts foam excess by 30 percent), it will also deploy serious business advice from a panel of experts, including New York restaurant mogul Eddie Huang and radio personality Nessa.
Take this nugget from the show's trailer, courtesy of Huang: "The thing that I want people to take away is that the things that make you weird, make you money."
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A Hard Business Takeaway
Though younger audiences may be enchanted by the idea of "limitless possibility" in the entrepreneurial realm, Ricci also sought to ground the series in reality. "We tried to walk a fine line between millionaires and people who were fulfilling their passions with unusual work."
The jobs featured in every episode will be centered on a particular theme. While episode one will tackle the music industry, episode two will focus its lens on "BroFessionals' -- or "guys with jobs that cater to real men," as MTV describes.
Every entrepreneur's salary is specifically noted, too, Ricci said, so that "there's a hard business takeaway."
But humor is palpably woven throughout -- as evidenced by the depiction of crime scene cleaners, junk food bloggers and even a human cannonball. "This isn't a show about people shuffling papers or filing taxes," host Andrew Schulz told Entrepreneur.com. To say the least.
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But if viewers can take one thing from the show, Schulz says, they should "view it as a sort of blueprint for their own lives." Even if they can't identify with a wacky career or idiosyncratic invention, an entrepreneurial undercurrent serves to inform and inspire.
Completely New Territory
Though career is top of mind for millennials -- and shows like Shark Tank have proven that a massive audience for this kind of content exists -- the domain of business represents completely new territory for MTV2, Ricci said.
"Our generation doesn't like rules," added Nessa. "We don't want the regular nine-to-five and we don't want to work for anyone else but ourselves."
The channel's demographic leans male, aged 12 to 34, and its biggest hit is Guy Code, in which a roundtable panel of comedians discusses the unspoken laws of manhood.
Jobs That Don't Suck will premiere immediately after the fourth season premiere of Guy Code -- the 11 o'clock hour, Ricci said, being the prime viewing slot for the channel.
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