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"Working" is a limited Netflix series hosted by Barack Obama and produced in part by Higher Ground, the production company he and Michelle Obama founded.
《工作》是由奥巴马主持的单季网飞纪录片，其中部分内容由他和米歇尔·奥巴马创立的高地制片公司制作。
In a voice-over, the former president tells us the production was inspired by Studs Terkel's pathbreaking 1974 oral history, "Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do," a hefty book that relayed the thoughts and stories of a wide swath of Americans, placing their words democratically side by side.
在画外音中，这位前总统告诉我们，这部纪录片的灵感来自斯塔兹·特克尔于1974年出版的开创性口述历史著作：《工作：人们谈论自己每天做些什么以及他们对此有何感受》。这本大部头传达了各色美国人的想法和故事，将他们所说的内容平等地并置一处。
The show's four episodes, made available last month, aim for something similar, spending time with workers at all levels of the three companies it focuses on -- letting viewers viscerally compare, say, the lives of a Manhattan housekeeper and the CEO of the conglomerate that owns the hotel where she works.
《工作》共有四集，已于上个月播出，其目标与特克尔的《工作》类似，即与它所关注的三家公司的各级员工共度一段时间，让观众直观地比较曼哈顿的一位酒店清洁工和这家酒店所属集团CEO的不同生活。
Money was clearly spent on this program. The cameras are slick, the angles creative, the songs expensively licensed. This may well be the production's chief value: It is shockingly rare to see the daily lives of working-class people represented on TV so plainly and honestly, let alone with such a budget.
很明显，这个纪录片项目是花了钱的。镜头拍摄很精美，角度很有创意，配乐的版权费很贵。这很可能就是这部纪录片的主要价值所在：极少能看到工薪阶级的日常生活被如此清晰、如此诚实地呈现在电视上，更不用说还有如此高的制作预算。
In that context, watching Sheila's meeting spiral out of control feels almost as subversive and revelatory as Terkel's book. The problem arises when the show attempts to explain what, specifically, has gone wrong to make that eruption possible.
在这种背景下，看着希拉的会议陷入失控，会让人感觉这几乎和特克尔的书一样具有颠覆性和启发性。当纪录片试图解释到底是哪里出了问题，从而导致了这种爆发时，问题就出现了。
Try as it might to stay close to the workers, the series can't resist its periodic voice-overs, in which Obama delivers industrial-grade doses of information over spiffy archival footage of domestic workers or the movie "Wall Street" or the economist Milton Friedman.
尽管纪录片试图与工作的人们保持比较近的距离，但还是忍不住定期播放画外音，在画外音中，奥巴马传递着高密度信息，并佐以家政工作者、电影《华尔街》或经济学家米尔顿·弗里德曼的精美档案视频。
The scripts touch on all sorts of systemic forces, from the workers left out of the New Deal to the macroeconomics of the decline of the middle class. The fact that the show needs to reach all the way back to the New Deal era underlines a key problem: America's perception of its own workplaces may be astonishingly out of date, steeped in denial about just how profoundly things have changed.
剧本触及了各种各样的系统性力量，从被新政排除在外的工人，到中产阶级衰落的宏观经济情况。该纪录片需要一直追溯到新政时代，这一事实突显了一个关键问题：美国人对本国工作环境的看法可能已经过时得令人惊讶，完全否认情况已经发生了多么深刻的变化。
The series wants to hang around working people, as Terkel did, to understand their hopes and dreams and contradictions. But it also wants to put forward an argument about what's happened to American workers that involves catching the viewer up on several decades of complex changes -- all presented by a politician who, you can't help noting, happened to be in charge of the country for a key stretch of the time being explored.
这部纪录片希望像特克尔一样待在劳动者身边，去理解他们的希望、梦想和矛盾。但它也想论述美国劳动者遭遇了什么，其中涉及让观众了解几十年来有哪些复杂的变化。所有这些都是由一位政治家主持的，而你不禁要指出，在纪录片所探讨的一段关键时期，他恰好掌管着这个国家。
