The Make Table
A  C o m e d y   a b o u t   S e r i o u s   T h i n g s

THE WORLD
In a franchise pizza place, some things are universally true.  The together kids work the front of house dealing with the product and the customers, the screwed up kids are in the back, prepping ingredients and washing dishes.  The really dumb kids bus tables.  The smart, suck-up kids work the register and wear the coveted shirt-with-a-collar.  And the Manager runs the show like a demigod, the lone adult lording over the teenage staff, inadvertently teaching valuable work and life lessons in the worst possible way.
 
The fast-food manager is a breed apart.  He has worked as an assistant manager in several other fast food establishments, never for longer than eighteen months.  He will soon work in several more.  He may hold an Associates Degree in Business from a Junior College.  Or he might have graduated from a state college with a 2.4 in General Studies.  But every single manager of Mr. Sal’s Pizza and Subs holds one additional diploma - a degree in Pizzology from Pie U, Mr. Sal’s training facility in suburban Omaha.  It’s an eight-week course, the longest and most thorough in the industry.  The manger typically has a family, consisting of a frazzled wife and several kids that they had way too young.  He is always well-groomed, but it always looks like it’s his first time to be so, like maybe he slept in his car.  The manager also has one or more of the following: a drinking problem, a drug addiction, a boyfriend, a rap sheet and/or an arrest warrant.  It’s from these men (and they’re almost all men) that generations of suburban teens learn about teamwork, commitment, reliability, selflessness, beer funnels, pornography, rolling papers, blow-jobs, dry heaves and bail bonds.  It’s not what the managers think they’re teaching and it’s not what the clueless parents think their kids are learning, but it is an invaluable lesson in the bullshit of adulthood and it’s the first crack in the armor of authority.  Seeing through these minor authority figures for who they really are is a big first step in understanding the adult word.
 
Kate and Brendan are the masters of the Make Table.  The Make Table is the refrigerated stainless steel table along which the pizza crust slides as the ingredients are piled on.  It is a place of fury and precision.  Chris and Debbie will be on their feet for hours at a shift, gorging on 32oz colas and making hundreds and hundreds of pizzas in a night.  Kevin, tall, handsome and cheesy, works the ovens and has the burns to prove it.  Mousy suck-up Kelly works the register.  In the back, Marty and Jimmy dip Skoal, listen to thrash metal and wash dishes like they’re on speed.  Because they're on speed.  They also drink all the beer that’s left in the bottoms of glasses and pitchers and eat exclusively out of bus tubs. 
 

​THE SEASONS
Each season, the teenage staff stays mostly in tact, but a new Manager is introduced and introduces a new question about adulthood.  Here are four examples:
 
JOE is a smarmy, sad, closeted queen who lives with his ‘brother’ and lies about having mob connections because he's so traumatized by a life of being bullied.  He will slowly skim money from the register to buy coke while setting up individual staff members to take the fall for him.  But he presents himself as super cool and treats the kids like adults in ways wrong and right.  He will come to truly love them and delude himself - and them - into thinking he's their friend.  They will be heartbroken when he finally gets caught. 
 
MIKE, a fat, oily guy who has worked in every single fast food establishment.  This is his last stop.  He has a young wife and five kids that drop him off for work in a beat-up old car.  He’s easy-going and sweet and has big cook-outs for the staff at his apartment in the hood, serving beer from a keg he - with help from the kids - stole from the restaurant.  Mike got married too young and had too many kids and is still living out his childhood by neglecting them and hanging out with his employees.  But the consequences of teen shenanigans are quite different for a thirty year-old family man. 
 
BOB seems way too smart and together for this job.  He’s got a nice car and he looks like he grooms well as a habit and he quotes great books and makes smart jokes.  But his behavior is erratic.  One evening he’s your best pal and praising you and giving you a raise.  The next, he’s crabby and he cusses you out and fires you.  Then he calls and acts like it never happened.  Bob, it turns out, had a very successful company of his own and it all went up his nose.  He is way overqualified for this gig, but he’s burned all of his bridges and this is just a stop on the way to the bottom.  Gangsters come into the restaurant and leave threatening messages for him with terrified kids as Bob hides in the cooler.  The kids imagine wild drug-lord scenarios and try to intervene.  The scenarios pretty much come true.  In the end of the season, Bob vanishes without a trace.
 
JAMES is actually a great guy.  A tall, righteous man with a neat-but-defiant afro, he has six kids he adores and a wife he’s dedicated to.  He truly cares about the staff and helps them sort out relationships and see through bullshit.  But, he’s been screwed by bosses and companies all his life and has a chip on his shoulder about his race and what it means.  When he moves on, it’s because he’s passed over for a promotion.  Maybe it’s about race, maybe something else, but even the kids are aware enough to know that he is the best manager this company has ever had and that an injustice has been done.  James struggles to keep his growing bitterness from poisoning his relationships with his young staff.  A large part of why he leaves is to leave those relationships on a positive note and not drag these young people into the racist muck his generation still has not put to rest. 

​Kate and Brendan are step-brother and sister, in a newly blended family.  So there's a low-level sexual tension they are constantly fighting against.  Brendan gets terrible advice, as usual, from Joe: "You live in the same house, man.  It's perfect.  You could be tapping that twenty-four seven, right under you parent's noses.  And if they say shit, it's all their fault for ruining your family and putting you in this position and confusing you and all that kinda shit.  You're a lucky young man..."
 
This will also give them tension and troubles at home, which the managers can give them terrible advice about and take advantage of.  When the parents go on their honeymoon, Mike convinces the kids to let a friend of his crash at their house for a couple of days.  He'll pay.  Why should that money go to the Ritz Carlton when it could go to you?  It's not like you’re throwing a party – you’re being entrepreneurial - your parents should be proud, not that you should tell them.  It's a disaster.  The dude's a freak, has a party, gets arrested, uses their address to order shit that the kids then have to intercept before their parents get home.  Mike escapes blame by selling out his friend, making excuses and paying the kids off (with cash from the register).  He also promotes them and opens the tap at work to thank them.
 
Eddie is always the Assistant Manager, always taking the fall for someone, always being Interim Manager after one gets fired and before the new one arrives.  He'e the sidekick of the restaurant business, the Barney Fife of pizza.  A little sweet and very naive, he's shocked at every revelation and sure the next guy is gonna do great.  He passes every opportunity to screw a boss and take his job, to turn a guy in for stealing.  Management thinks he lacks ambition.
 
Kevin is the real entrepreneur.  He works late, offers to do extra things for the f'd managers for a little more money.  He has ideas.  He's about to graduate high school and - though very bright - is skipping college.  In college, he says, everyone is smart.  Here, almost nobody is smart and they're all fucked up, which gives him a huge advantage.  This store clears $450,000.00 a year because the ingredients and the help are cheap.  He swears he will own this store - and several more - before the rest of them are out of college.  He'll make ten times your starting salary.  He leaves after season one to work in the district office.  He comes back in season 2 as the district manager.  By season three he’s the owner, absent but fully aware of the realities of his bad managers.  Why does he keep them?  Because they're so small and petty that they'll never make much money, so they're cheap.  They're disposable, like everything else in the place.  And suddenly, the managers don't seem like the bad guys, they seem like the victims.  The owners will profit from them and throw them away, the kids will move on to real professions and the managers will be wrung out and taken advantage of until they die.

THE EPISODES
Each episode centers around an event.  Here are a few examples:
 
THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT
A drunk, irate customer throws Brendan over a table, then complains to the manager about Brendan's attitude, which had been perfectly professional.  The manager promptly comps the guy's food and disciplines Brendan.  His bruised ribs are not an excuse to miss work, either.

​THE DOUGH DONG
The staff meeting where the new crew chief is going to be announced.  Brendan and Kate expect it to be Kelly.  The night before, the closing staff sculpts a ten foot-long penis, with balls, out of leftover dough and place it on the tables for the meeting in the morning.  By 9:00AM, it has tripled in size and is threatening to droop to the floor.  Joe, the manager, comes in stoned (which none of the kids get) and finds the penis hilarious.  He smashes a dough testicle and makes a breakfast pizza out of it.  It’s a blast.  But, Kelly happens to be pretending to fellate the giant dough dong when the Regional Manager, Buddy, steps in.  To save face, Joe abruptly announces that Brendan will be the new Crew Chief.  He is presented with the coveted collared shirt and a fifty-cent per hour raise.  
 
CREW CHIEF
As the new crew chief, Brendan learns much about the manager’s job, largely because he now has to do it.  His first task is to fire Kelly (though she will continue to hang around the place like a sad ghost for months).  Joe, the manager, says he’s making Brendan do it to teach him the hard lesson of management, but the truth is that Joe is just too much of a coward to do it.  During the Friday night rush, Brendan is overwhelmed with the new responsibility, the Make Table is a wreck and resentments are high.  Maybe it was an accident when Kevin burned him with a five hundred degree pizza pan.  He did yell, “Burn ya’ and laugh!” when he swung it around, but he always yells that.  After three days and a long night of doing Joe’s job for him, Brendan is mugged at 3:00AM when making the nightly bank deposit that Joe was supposed to make.  Joe is berated by the cops for allowing a sixteen year old with advertising on his shirt to carry a marked bank bag containing $4000.00 to a night deposit all alone in the middle of the night.  After throwing Brendan under the bus, Joe tells him that he still believes in him, no matter what that cop says.  Cops are pussies.  In the subsequent episodes, Brendan will eventually have to turn Joe in for embezzling, knowing his mentor will be fired and probably go to jail.

JENNA-TALIA
The new girl, Jenna, earns a nickname by trying to screw every guy in the restaurant.  Brendan’s dilemma is, should I do it?  And if not, why not?  The dishwashers are all in, as is the current dim-witted busboy.  Eventually she tries to seduce the manager, James, who is an actual grown man and rebuffs her.  When he realizes what she’s doing, he sends an anonymous note to her parents.  It’s through James and the spread through the restaurant of HPV, that Brendan begins to understand how damaged a girl would have to be to behave that way and why he made the right decision in not sleeping with her. 

THE MONA PIZZA
Brendan is 'hired' to paint the logo on the wall behind the oven.  His pay is having a piece like that in his portfolio.  He works his ass off, gets burned, etc.  They push the oven into place and it looks great.  But Joe was running late so they have to fire the oven up to get ready for lunch.  Before Brendan can photograph the sign, it starts to melt from the heat (Joe bought cheap paint - tempera?)  Then, as he takes pictures of it, the paint bursts into flame and the suppression system comes on. 

I SPY
Manager Mike overstaffs on the busiest nights, even though it ruins his precious labor costs.  He tells the kids he doesn’t like to work too hard and they shouldn’t have to, either.  He also stacks the 100lb bags of flour in a certain way in the back storage room, piled up like a staircase.  Then the kids realize the reason he overstaffs - so that every time a hot woman goes into the rest room, he’s free to run through the kitchen and scamper up the flour staircase.  At the top, he pops his head through the ceiling tile and peers over the wall, through a broken ceiling tile and down onto the ladies’ toilet.  When the kids figure this out, it’s real dilemma for them.  It’s horrible, but funny.  And he’s clearly twisted, but he’s their friend and their boss and their connection to beer.  Do they turn him in or not?  If they do, how do they do it?  What happens to his wife and kids, who they also care about?
 
THE PORN PARTY
Joe’s ‘brother’ Eduardo livens up the teenage beer party with large-screen porn, most of it featuring men.  Are any of the kids gay?  How can they be sure?  It's an accidentally liberating event.

THE QUEASY DISHWASHER
The quiet older grad student who washes dishes asks to go home early one night.  In the morning, the staff reads that he killed his girlfriend and himself after he left.  But his paycheck has already been cut, so the manager decides Brendan has to go find some next of kin to give it to, since the hours were worked.  This sends Brendan into a world for which he is completely unprepared.

JANE
Jane is a manager only briefly.  Though plenty smart, she is damaged and uses her sexuality as pretty much her only weapon.  She is surprisingly similar to all the male managers, but it plays out worse, of course, for a woman.  She will be fired for lewd conduct the others all got away with and the kids will see the deep sexism in the world world for the first time.

JACKIE
One time, horsing around in the parking lot on the hood of a moving car, Jackie fell off and hit her head.  She didn't die, but she did lose her sense of smell

EAR WAX
There is a new girl who is lovely and playful and has an accent.  She and Brendan hit it off and she's flirty one night at a staff party and - it's on.  But as they're leaving to go consumate their new horniness, she turns her head and he sees that her ear is visibly full of very dark wax.  Horrified, he now has to fond a way out of the tryst.  His manager will give him some of the worst advice ever given.
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