When Jessie Bluedorn and Kylie Holloway sat down to script an episode of their comedy series SLICK, they invented a fictional oil-and-gas client who wanted their ad agency to create a Sims-style video game to convince children that investing in oil is “not only smart, but good.” On paper, it played as absurdist satire: the darkly comedic yet logical endpoint of a creative industry that will build almost anything a fossil fuel company asks for.

Then Bluedorn found out the game already existed.

“I did not hear about this project until I had already written Oyl Lyfe,” she tells me, referring to the SLICK episode built around the game. In real life, Norwegian energy giant Equinor had made a game called “Energy Town,” distributing it to U.K. schools, for children aged between seven and 14.

The Energy Town project was uncovered by a Norwegian news organization, and in the U.K., campaigners alleged it was a stunt by Equinor to boost support for the controversial Rosebank oil and gas field. The project is now documented for posterity in this year’s F-List , an annual database of advertising and PR contracts with fossil fuel companies, put together by the NGO Clean Creatives, which has partnered with SLICK.

“It’s just hard to believe that in the year of our Lord 2026, you can make schoolchildren play a pro-oil video game in the classroom,” says Bluedorn. “That’s really shocking to me.”

The coincidence—if that’s what it was—recalls a similarly prophetic creative choice by Charlie Brooker, the writer of the dark sci-fi TV series Black Mirror, in 2011. Indeed, “the worst thing that can happen is somebody accidentally does your satire in real life,” Bluedorn laments. Truth being just as strange as fiction is, for a satirist, an unfortunate outcome.

Bluedorn and Holloway’s SLICK is an absurdist workplace comedy about the employees of a creative agency servicing oil and gas clients, and it premiered live at Climate Week NYC on Monday, September 21.

The release coincides with the 2026 edition of the F-List, which this year is the largest yet, recording 1,321 contracts between 802 agencies and 386 fossil fuel clients across 73 countries. Ad and marketing conglomerate WPP holds 88 of those contracts, and is singled out by Clean Creatives as the only major holding company to have “directly and consistently acknowledged” the reputational and financial risk of working with fossil fuel companies in its own policies, without that acknowledgment changing its behavior. Meanwhile, U.S. multinational Omnicom, the F-List’s largest holding company this year, now carries 118 fossil fuel contracts, the highest number the F-List has ever recorded for a single network.

Far from distancing itself from fossil fuels, Big Ad seems to be getting cosier with Big Oil. The situation “continues to illustrate how oil and gas companies are fully committed to fossil fuels, even though the advertising and PR agencies which represent them claim they’re facilitating a transition to renewables,” says Nayantara Dutta, Clean Creatives’ head of research. “Global leaders and scientists have urged agencies to take action, but we have not seen any meaningful results.”

That’s despite a mounting regulatory backlash. On September 15, Bristol became the latest British city to ban fossil fuel advertising outright from its own billboards and bus shelters, along with ads for SUVs, airlines, cruises and fast fashion. Bristol joins more than 20 U.K. councils, including Edinburgh and Sheffield, that already restrict ads for polluting products. “We don’t want Bristol to be a billboard for polluters,” the council’s deputy leader, Heather Mack, told media. Adfree Cities, the campaign network behind the push, wants the approach adopted nationally.

That might not be a far-fetched ambition. In July 2025, more than 100 U.K. advertising organizations representing over 1,000 advertisers signed a joint letter backing a nationwide ban on fossil fuel advertising and sponsorship , explicitly comparing the industry’s fossil fuel work to historic tobacco marketing. The campaign, coordinated by Clean Creatives, Creatives for Climate and Purpose Disruptors, the same groups now partnered with SLICK, followed a 110,000-signature petition led by naturalist Chris Packham, and preceded a parliamentary debate on the issue.

How close that ambition is to becoming law depends on who you ask. “Increasingly in the U.K., elected representatives are seeing that health and climate goals are being undermined by the adverts that promote heavily polluting products and services,” says Andrew Simms, director of the New Weather Institute, which tracks the spread of local advertising bans. “That’s why increasing numbers of towns and cities are ending ads for fossil fuels and things that use them heavily, like flights and cars. Now it’s time for the U.K. nationally to follow this local leadership, and the only thing stopping them really is inertia and the influence of the fossil fuel industry and its dependent sector themselves.”

Against the might of the oil giants, what can a web series aimed at a handful of creative agencies really accomplish?

The impact may come down to format: rather than pitching itself as protest content, SLICK is competing as entertainment. The show arrives with its own credentials—the series has already won Best Web Series at the New York Shorts International Film Festival and Outstanding Achievement in Writing at NYC Web Fest.

The show deliberately avoids portraying its characters as villains. “Nobody in the show is an evil mastermind who loves killing everyone,” Bluedorn points out. Wes, the team lead, is twice divorced and behind on child support; strategist Martha is just trying to get through the day; Marquee is a flamboyant creative who is horribly bored. Nobody wakes up glad to be at the agency. Bluedorn’s point is that it’s the agency infrastructure and corporate clients who can’t claim ignorance, and not so much the individual employees doing their jobs.

That framing is a deliberate strategy. Bluedorn, who also runs the philanthropic organization Carmack Collective, has spent years funding climate documentaries and journalism, and has watched most of it fail to travel beyond people who already care. Her working theory now is that it is format, rather than message, which is the bottleneck: “If you don’t already care a lot about climate, you’re not going to come home from a busy day at work and lock in to a three-hour documentary. You’re going to scroll Instagram or hit up YouTube,” Bluedorn says. For that reason, SLICK is snappy, comedic and social-native on purpose. “It’s entertainment first, with the undercurrent of existential issues below.”

Bluedorn draws a distinction between people who are simply climate-aware, which she believes covers most of her millennial and Gen Z demographic, and the much smaller slice who are climate-engaged: people who are making choices and taking action according to their knowledge of climate change.

Activating that aware middle, Bluedorn argues, means dropping the guilt tactics that some awareness campaigns have opted for. “A lot of people are just trying to survive the cost of living crisis,” she says. “How do we reach those people in a way that’s not preaching—like, you need to watch this documentary and go to 18 protest marches, or you’re a bad person—but genuinely meet people where they are?”

Whether SLICK actually does that is, by Bluedorn’s own admission, still unproven. The show has been available only since September 8, and she has no audience data yet beyond raw views. But her longer-term hope is that viewers might connect the satire back to their own workplaces: “They might wonder, ‘is my creative agency doing that? Let me click through and see,’” she says.

Lucy von Sturmer, founder of the Creatives for Climate network, says that’s precisely the moment her organization is built for. “Many people come to Creatives for Climate at precisely the point that they recognise that something is wrong, but do not yet know what action to take,” she tells me.

From there, the group offers a formal pathway, including a framework that maps how someone inside an agency can progress from building awareness and resisting greenwashing, through to changing client-selection practices and actively supporting the climate transition through their own creative work. Beyond that, there are toolkits for checking an agency’s client list against the F-List, training programs, an Ethical Agency Alliance for agencies building a fossil-free business model, and initiatives that help brands screen fossil-fuel-linked agencies out of their own supplier lists. The numbers, von Sturmer says, suggest a real appetite for this support: Creatives for Climate now runs a network of 8,000 professionals across 90 countries, and its toolkits have been downloaded more than 14,000 times.

Von Sturmer says what she can’t measure is a direct line from one episode of comedy to one specific action. But she argues that’s the wrong test to apply. “It does something a report cannot—taking audiences inside the room and allowing them to recognise the conversations, incentives and rationalisations that can happen,” she says. “Its power lies in acting as a cultural catalyst within a wider impact ecosystem, carrying the issue beyond climate reports and campaign audiences to people who might never otherwise engage with it.”

The agencies actually named on the F-List have had little to say about any of this. “Nobody’s reached out to us or made a public statement,” Bluedorn says. It’s a pattern the F-List’s own researchers have documented too: fossil fuel work increasingly goes unpublicized, absent from agency websites and case studies even as the contracts continue.

But that silence isn’t industry-wide, and treating it as one bloc misses the more interesting story. “The industry is genuinely fracturing,” says von Sturmer. “The ethical divide is becoming increasingly visible between agencies that continue to profit from fossil-fuel work and a growing movement of agencies and professionals actively rejecting it.” She draws a direct line to an earlier industry reckoning: “We see a clear parallel with tobacco advertising,” she tells me. “Change did not happen because every agency or advertiser independently reached the same ethical conclusion. Public awareness shifted, the evidence became undeniable, parts of the industry broke ranks, and regulation ultimately established a common standard.”

Bluedorn doesn’t claim the show will convert anyone into an activist, and says that isn’t the goal. “I think my ultimate goal across my work is to reshape the zeitgeist around responsibility for the climate crisis,” she says. “It’s actually not your individual carbon footprint, no matter what BP told you. It’s the systems that we built.”

SLICK plays that system for laughs, and the gag invariably lands—until you remember it isn’t one. When real oil companies are rolling out ad campaigns every bit as strange as the fiction intended to satirize them, it can be hard to tell who’s joking. But after six years of F-List data, the question shouldn’t be about how absurd the industry has become. It’s about how many more people are willing to do the work.