APPLE | The Whole Working-From-Home Thing | 2020
I Laughed for Seven Straight Minutes / Apple "The Whole Working-From-Home Thing"
In July 2020, right in the middle of the pandemic, a seven-minute short film arrived from America. It was called "The Whole Working-From-Home Thing." And yes, it was exactly that: kids bursting into meetings, dogs barking, video calls in pajamas, screen-share mistakes, and somehow still making the deadline. The video crossed 10 million views within two days of release. As a sequel to 2019's acclaimed "The Underdogs," it wrapped the chaos that literally everyone was living through in humor.
The problem
In the first film from 2019, four scrappy employees scrambled to impress their strict boss Vivienne with a pitch for a round pizza box (an actual concept Apple invented). The sitcom-style approach caught on, and Adweek named it one of the best ads of 2019. But in 2020, the world changed completely. With the pandemic reshaping how people worked, director Mark Molloy decided to write a lockdown version — an ode to remote working. Vivienne suddenly announces that Project Pandora's Box is back, except now it has to be recyclable, there's no time, and nobody's in the office. From the "comfort" of their homes, the team has to somehow meet her brutal demands.
The insight
The director said he wanted to capture the spirit of the moment they were living through — watching a genuinely fascinating period unfold became the inspiration. The film packs every cliché of working from home into seven minutes, but the quirky characters make it fun and funny. What matters is that Apple's video captures the specific, sometimes strange challenges of WFH with precision and humor — it's not exaggeration, it's observation. There's also something beautifully meta about the fact that the obstacles the production team itself had to overcome mirrored the logistical challenges the characters face in the story, resulting in a short film that's dynamic, inventive, and uniquely of the moment — reflecting our own reality back at us.
The idea
Director Mark Molloy and award-winning cinematographer Greig Fraser came up with a hybrid approach, combining remote filming with a skeleton crew following COVID guidelines. Looking back on the core of the series, the director said the product is treated as a character, never as "a product" — there's never a gratuitous cutaway product shot, it's all woven into the script. Every day brings new victories and challenges: the scramble as the calendar fills up with meetings and milestones, brainstorming sessions that go everywhere without going anywhere, and camaraderie that plays out through iMessage, group FaceTimes, and shared documents. Dave, permanently in a bathrobe, is in a constant battle with kids heckling him during work hours, while Brian does virtual shoe try-ons in the middle of the day. But that's real life.
What happened
The campaign won a Silver Lion and four Shortlist placements at Cannes Lions, plus Gold at the Clio Awards 2020. Within two days of release it had racked up over 10 million views on YouTube, and Adweek called it "the definitive ad about working from home." The series continued afterward, with a third installment, "Escape From the Office," a nine-minute film in which the Underdogs join the Great Resignation, which won the Film Grand Prix at Cannes Lions. The Apple at Work – The Underdogs series is widely regarded as a benchmark in commercial filmmaking, bringing the craft and narrative ambition of prestige television to advertising, and redefining what a campaign can achieve through sharply observed workplace comedy, sweeping scale, and deeply relatable characters.
Afterthought
I laughed for seven straight minutes. But while laughing, I nearly cried too — because all of it was exactly what we actually lived through in 2020. For a lot of people, working from home felt chaotic and challenging, and the director himself admitted that even though he'd worked from home for years, managing a team while homeschooling four elementary-school-age kids over those past months was genuinely difficult. What makes this film so great comes down to the director's own words: he wanted to give people a window into the world of work, and to find the nuance and humor in that situation. Of course Apple wants to sell a product — but before that, there's a kind of kindness in simply saying, "I get it, this is hard." A giant company like Apple managed to crystallize a universal feeling into seven minutes, a record of this moment in time. Watching it again now, it brings back those days, and it still warms my heart a little.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 2020
