Buffy The Vampire Slayer

What is The Office about?

The Office, UK edition, is on most days my favourite comedy in any medium (my favourite film is nominally Magnolia or [sometimes] Fight Club, but I might need to name The Singing Detective my fave screen drama award). Ricky Gervais created in David Brent a character with vast comic potential and proceeded to invest him with shocking depth and warmth; his performance in the Series Two finale (’Don’t make me redundant’) is gorgeous, a master class in using comic rhythms and momentum to deepen dramatic payoffs. Buffy is a 144-hour lesson in the same subject, but the abrasiveness of The Office gave it a power that the comforting Buffy sometimes sacrificed. Merchant and Gervais didn’t make a single misstep doing that show; I watch the formulaic, often soporific Fawlty Towers and wonder why Gervais holds it in such high esteem. Oh well.

The American Office, run by Greg Daniels, started off very similar to its British source material in tone and attitude - the six-episode first season stands up nicely now but is a separate thing from what came after. Seasons 2 and 3 were excellent blends of serial and episodic plots, particular Season Three, with its extensive callbacks and finely paced character development and deepening relationships. As time has gone on, the characters on the US Office have almost all grown more sympathetic; the most peripheral characters (Creed, Stanley, Meredith, Angela) have gotten more outsized and ridiculous, as has Kelly, but with the exception of Ryan the Temp, everyone else is just more likable. More...sitcom-y. Michael, Jim, Pam, Roy, Dwight, Jan, the horrifying-to-goofy Andy, even the increasingly brittle Karen: you get behind them.[*]

That’s not a bad thing in this case. The show’s main strength, going into Season Four (two weeks or so), is its depiction of a surrogate family that is totally unpredictable in its ratio of wacky antics to sudden, painful microdrama. The marvelous Joss-directed ’Business School’ episode[**] from last Spring is a case in point: Michael gives a ridiculous lecture, the officemates all act like idiots about the bat - we’re supposed to believe that Dwight isn’t merely a boob but actually flat-out deranged? - and yet the episode ends with pure tearjerking aww-how-sweet moments to illustrate Michael’s essential goodness and good sense. Dunder-Mifflin is about people, ’and people will never go out of business.’ It’s not played as a moment of naivete; we’re rooting for him, and for the company. For Pam he’s like a surrogate father; to Ryan he’s the ridiculous secret-genius uncle; he really takes care of Dwight, and for all his obliviousness he really cares about Jim’s romantic wellbeing. And of course the Jan-goes-crazy plot casts an even more sympathetic light on Michael’s life.

Which finally brings me to my point: The Office has very little to do with the office.

TV scholars have noted the varied cultural work performed by TV shows that depict workplaces as families - for instance, how such fantastic depictions justify/normalize the encroachment of work obligations into family life and the substitution of merely contingent, highly structured, hierarchical work relationships for negotiated organic family ones. On The Office, you increasingly get a host of reassuring sitcom tropes popping up: father really does know best, true love really does win out (and deserves it), returning to the status quo every week is OK, big guys are lovable lugs, bitches just need some old-fashioned loving. The show is at times genuinely difficult to watch - cf. ’Cocktails,’ in which Michael and Pam go public with their blossoming demented relationship, or the painful-yet-heartwarming wedding episode - but it was a lot harder, for me, in Season One (and to a lesser extent the otherwise superior Season Two). Steve Carrell and the writers have created something wonderful in Michael Scott, but David Brent’s sneering blithering accidentally malicious little troll of a boss has been transformed into something easier to stomach. After fifty episodes you don’t believe that Michael is full of awful racist jokes like Brent; you begin to see his foibles as mental clutter or harmless accidents, because the fact remains that all around him people’s lives are improving all the time, often because of him. Whatever he is, he isn’t quite poisonous.

I was shocked when, in the first episode of the US episode, Pam yells directly at Michael, ’You’re a jerk!’ In the first season Michael Scott was a jerk, but I’d already seen a bunch of Season Three at that point, and I knew he softened considerably over time. Tonally that scene seemed to belong in the British and not the American show.

But it also seemed out of place, retrospectively, in another sense: it’s very much a workplace moment. Pam is blowing up because she’s going to lose her job and her flirtation with Jim; what’s at stake is steeped in the show’s environment. By Season Three, the best moments were job-related - Michael’s business school lecture, the salary negotiations, the two branches integrating, Dwight’s various office-etiquette near-breaches, Pam’s growing rapport with Dwight in the finale, the magnificent sales-call sequence - but the characteristic moments were increasingly the overwrought-relationship moments, the strange-field-trip moments, Diwali, the convention. In part I suspect the show’s comedy had simply outgrown its premise, but this growth seems to manifest in very specific ways in American TV comedy. Look at everything from the dumb Friends to the smart Frasier to the head-shaking Malcolm in the Middle: as the stories get bigger they get safer, because stories tend to boil down to the familiar terrain of romantic/family relationships. Even on a show like The Office, where the detailed setting is so central to the show’s success, you can imagine a bunch of the later episodes being moved to different sets almost invisibly. (Odd to me: the ’Product Recall’ episode was one of the season’s weakest, I thought, in spite of or because of its efforts to link Dunder-Mifflin to its larger world.)

All this is to say a couple of things. First, The Office has shifted focus from the Platonic office environment to a very specific one; it’s better than it’s ever been, but also far less universalizable in the situations it depicts. That makes it easier to watch, I think - it implies less about our own experiences, but has the potential to inquire more deeply into the detailed experiences of (fictional) others.

Second (and the reason I wrote this post in the first place), the DVD’s for Season Three are still marketed, against all sense, as being about ’cubicle hell’ - and the pull quotes are all about the show’s value as workplace satire. When was the last time anyone watched The Office as satire? If anything the third season of the US show has taken the tone of the original UK Office Christmas Special, which (following Series Two) shifted emphasis from The Workplace to Our Silly Workplace, bearing down harder on Brent and centralizing the romance and friendship plots. (Same for Extras, about which I had mixed but mostly good feelings at the end.) Note to NBC: The Office is not a satire. It was certainly one in Season One, and somewhat in Season Two, but try and imagine a Season Three episode like ’Hot Girl,’ with its strongly in-character ickiness that nonetheless made strong points about workplace sexuality in a general way. You could say the show’s satiric edge is a victim of the ensemble’s excellence (it really is a great cast): the main characters are so finely-drawn that the right writerly choices for satire would necessitate a betrayal of the characters’ particularity. You have to serve the individual actors and their characters, so you can’t cop out to make broad social points.

(Yet another reason The Sopranos was hard to pin down in later seasons: Tony was so complex and his reactions so multifaceted that the show’s satire was often buried fathoms deep, yet David Chase and his writers kept a broad-brush style of portraiture that sometimes left the audience wondering what kind of show they were watching. It wasn’t a soap opera, but it wasn’t The Wire for damn sure.)

I love the show; I root for the characters without hesitation or shame, and I cover my eyes and cry in equal measure, laughing all the while. The GF and I will be watching when the new season starts. But I think we should consider how the show has evolved in its short run, and why it’s done so, and along what structure/content/intent lines; I suspect its development is indicative of certain forces present in all network TV, not just in the broad, vague ’everything gets homogenized!’ way but in specific, predictable formal ways - which, I’m guessing, correlate directly to certain ideological or imaginative-sympathetic outcomes. The form of the show has altered, as has its function, and I wonder to what extent we can map the one as cause onto the other as effect. And, um, vice versa. I’m not gonna lie to you, it’s nearly 2am and I’m too tired to check whether those last sentences meant anything at all.

[*] I wonder whether the writer/actor dual roles of B.J. Novak and Mindy Kaling have a big effect on the way the show plays out tonally: as Kaling’s performance has gotten loopier and Novak’s more nakedly meanspirited (his is the character who most directly insults the whole enterprise of the show), perhaps they’ve pulled the other characters in slightly more meta directions. Huh.

[**] I know I’m a total Josshole, but it has to be said: ’Business School’ and ’The Job’ (S3 finale) are the most emotionally satisfying episodes of the show. Pam’s reaction to Michael’s earnest praise at the gallery, and more importantly, Steve Carrell’s extraordinary reaction to Jenna Fischer’s tears and hug, never fail to move me. Middle-aged men, squandered opportunities, the sad clown. It’s a wonder I never got addicted to All in the Family.