This year marks the 30th anniversary of "Fraggle Rock"'s first airing on January 10, 1983. In the spring, the cast and crew got together for a reunion in Toronto, where the show was taped. They gave toasts, performed songs, and ate well into the night. There was a Marjory-the-Trash-Heap cake topped with intricate sugar-paste Fraggles and Doozers that fed over a hundred people.
While most of the participants were getting on in years, two guests had not been old enough to work on "Fraggle Rock." Mark Bishop, the CEO of Marvel Media, and Matt Wexler, former executive producer at Spin Master Entertainment, both gave speeches attesting to the profound effect "Fraggle Rock" had on them at a young age. "Fraggle Rock" gave a lot of people the impression that they could do what they love for a living, and many of them now do.
But many don't. Corporate work culture has become particularly toxic in recent years. In August, a twenty-one-year-old intern at Bank of America Merrill Lynch died from a seizure after performing eight all-nighters. His internship was paid, and that is a rarity...
This is the opening of my essay on Fraggle Rock, published Dec 17 at The Awl. It was such a joy to get to talk with the show's collaborators about their work, and when the article came out, Jocelyn Stevenson even told me I was "brilliant"! Talk about a compliment.
I'm proud to put this essay out into the world, because I think it's a message we all need and want to hear. A week later, it's still one of the site's most popular articles - with 560 likes and 135 tweets. If you forward it to your boss, who knows, maybe business will look a little more fragglish in the new year?