A comedy about the universal experience of looking for a job.

SYNOPSIS:

SETTING

“HYER & HYRE” -- an offbeat job placement firm where the pros who try to land work for people are as complicated as their clients.

Each episode of Placements begins with a cold open: short video clips of job seekers talking about their funniest, saddest, most unusual job interview. The clips are real stories taken from real viewers, who submit them online. And each week one of their stories becomes the basis for a story line of that week's show.

Each week a chorus line of job candidates arrives at the office of HYER & HYRE. A handful are regulars; for them, Hyer and Hyre has become their Cheers. Others are newcomers. It's a place where they reveal their needs, hopes and fears, and watch their dreams crash into reality. We meet the hopeful and the sad, the boisterous and the beaten -- Russian scientists, desperate for any kind of work, divorced housewives trying to get back into the marketplace, proud men who were “downsized” and must start over, genius kids who are socially clueless but fearless, the whole spectrum of people questing for money, self-respect, and a place in the world.

The staff is an ensemble of recruiters trying to help others while barely able to keep their own lives together. A quirky group, including the boss, ARNOLD BASKIN, his obsession with a success that has eluded him in conflict with his underlying decency; ELÊNE LAUSANNE, charming, full of French malapropisms; the two-faced DEL McLAUGHLIN; the prickly receptionist from Brooklyn, ARIEL BOMBAST; the clumsy eagerness of VINH CHATTERJEE; the naïveté of MARNEY JAMES; and the wide-eyed wonder of newcomer RICK SANDERS.

This wildly disparate office staff deals with hopeful clients and the people that do the hiring, from the well-meaning to the unscrupulous, from the best and brightest to the dumbest and worst. They negotiate, wheedle, cajole, browbeat and sometimes just pray on behalf of their aspiring applicants. Every day they confront, second-guess and ultimately work with each other, in a commission-driven environment, collegial on the surface and wonderfully rapacious underneath.

PLACEMENTS, with its ensemble cast and rotating applicants working and hanging out at Hyer and Hyre, has built-in appeal across the board -- depicting the elemental need to find work, engaging anyone who’s ever looked for a job, been hired or fired.