K-SCORE: 60
Creators: Greg Daniels, Michael Schur, Paul Lieberstein, Jennifer Celotta, B.J. Novak, Mindy Kaling, Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, Randall Einhorn
Starring: Steve Carell, Rainn Wilson, Jenna Fischer, John Krasinski, Ed Helms, B.J. Novak, Mindy Kaling, Angela Kinsey, Paul Lieberstein, Craig Robinson, Leslie David Baker, Brian Baumgartner, Oscar Nunez, Phyllis Smith, Melora Hardin, Amy Ryan, Ellie Kemper, Creed Bratton
Spoiler Level: Moderate
“If, by season nine, the final season, Creed Bratton isn’t your favorite character, I don’t understand what you’re watching for.”
The first year I had a Netflix account was 2007, my Freshman year of college. Discovering the instant-watch binge and discovering The Office went hand-in-hand in my life. (In college you don’t do anything meaningful and you have abundant free time.) I probably watched season two of The Office ten times that year. The mild workplace clashes of those incredibly well-written characters, the wonderfully subtle humor, and the very slowly growing tension in the overarching storylines, especially Jim’s and Pam’s, put it at the top of my list of shows to watch. At one point in my life, had you asked me what my favorite TV series was, I’d likely have said The Office, and that was in an era where I actually watched a significant number of them. So sadly, the downfall of The Office coincides with my declining interest in television.
If you’ll allow me to speculate as to why and when The Office became bad for a minute- Foremost it’s a problem derived from writing by committee. These shows staff up a group of ten to fifteen writers and create episodes by having someone write one and then having a ton of people sit around a conference table picking apart every little decision made by that writer. Editing is one thing. They’re creating camels. They’re attempting to design the perfect thing by having so much input that no decision is ignored. This just does not work. If someone has a creative vision for something, then that person’s input with regards to the final product is about a hundred times more important than anyone else’s opinion. No one else can fully understand what the visionary was trying to do. If you find one other person to really “get” what you’ve created, you’re lucky, and if they have the ability to articulate ways to improve that creation then you’re exceptionally lucky. The chance that fifteen people, changing seats, changing leadership roles in between the production of episodes, the production of seasons, all share that vision and can work together to improve the product approaches zero. I can’t know for sure, not knowing who created what in The Office, but I’m guessing that Michael Schur was the mind behind The Office, taking Ricky Gervais’s original product and adapting it to American audiences and making it his own in a way that was hilarious, thoughtful, valuable, and entertaining. I’m also guessing that dozens of the writers over the years, both before he left and afterward, got their grubby fingers all over those scripts and were, more than anything, desperate for laughs, desperate for career success at the cost of a final product. I don’t know that for sure, but it doesn’t matter. I can only evaluate what I’ve now watched in its entirety.
“Season two is spectacular.”
Season one of The Office is a tiny thing, a show finding its sea legs, finding out how to be more than an American version. Season two is spectacular. The Dundies, Office Olympics, The Fire, Halloween, The Client, Email Surveillance, Christmas Party, The Injury, Dwight’s Speech, Drug Testing, Conflict Resolution, Casino Night, one after the other after the other, the episodes are funny, incrementally advance the characters who all have relatable slow-paced “regular” lives, and stay true to its formula of a mockumentary catching the little absurdities and the passions of people in a boring office job. Because of the somewhat explosive end to season two, season three is a little bit wilder. They introduced a whole other branch and with it Ed Helms’s big-personality. Yet largely that season is also a success. The tension between Jim and Pam continues. Most of what they feel for each other stays unsaid. Michael still is the loud boss with very little self-awareness. Similarly Dwight is far too intense for his own good. Most of those episodes are still funny. Characters like Meredith, Creed, Stanley, Oscar, and Kevin might have one or two moments in an episode, never more than a gem of character and no substantial conflict. They don’t need it.
“Pam becomes the first of many victims of losing her original character.”
Season four you start to see where things go awry. Jim and Pam get together and it’s a creative disaster. A dozen hours of romantic tension and the show decides to skip their union for what? A tiny joke about the couple trying and failing to hide their new relationship from the company? Worthless choice and the first among many destructive choices that I just refuse to believe came from the same person that created those characters in the first place. The show was also dealing with a writer’s strike in that season so started to experiment with the “hour” episodes, which of course are about forty-two minutes. Of the fifteen or so forty minute episodes in the show, I’d say fourteen of them are about twenty minutes too long. The whole concept of the show is to film a boring office and catch little interactions of these characters. You can’t sustain a meaningful large-scale conflict for that long without breaking from that mold or boring your audience. This is a format where Take-Your-Daughter-to-Work Day is enough for an entire episode. You’re telling me I’m going to care about Michael’s credit card debt problem in The Money for forty-two minutes? I don’t. Worse than sloppy pacing, the season suffers from characters bubbling over in personality. Pam becomes the first of many victims of losing her original character. She’s no longer the passive, quiet, lost receptionist. She flips a switch, exemplified by letting her hair down, and suddenly she’s always honest with everyone, louder, more involved in other people’s problems, more opinionated, and embarking on a series of half-assed conflicts about her art career, her marriage and family life, problems with her parents, and eventually a relationship conflict with Jim purposefully designed to drag you through the mud just in a desperate attempt to recreate the magic of their relationship in season two. Michael and Jan’s relationship is so absurd, so in-your-face dysfunctional that there are entire episodes that are pure awkward agony. The Dinner Party became the first episode of The Office that I refuse to rewatch. And the overarching conflicts in the company steer as far away from the low-stakes boring-job concept as possible, with Ryan in corporate, committing fraud.
By season five, I disliked the show. Angela becomes the second victim of losing her original character. She has an affair with Dwight while being engaged to Andi, and at one point the two are literally fighting in the parking lot. You know, just like at your office, right? For five of the nine seasons, Angela switches between incredibly uptight and private, to promiscuous, to lonely and depressed, to obsessed with appearances, to conniving. I lost track of her individual motivations after season four, and lost interest after season five. Seasons four and five also started to put some of the ancillary characters front and center when they were far funnier in the background. Did I Stutter has entirely too much Stanley, and makes the most obvious choices in characterization. Moroccan Christmas puts Meredith in the limelight for some reason, but then does nothing with her. In Cafe Disco, Dwight is treating Phyllis like a horse, and she expresses concerns about her marriage to Bob Vance, none of which matters later on. Yet the season is borderline unwatchable because of the series of episodes involving The Michael Scott Paper Company. Not only did they start to combine dramatic character fights and life-changing circumstances with company conflicts, but they did so in a way that isn’t fun to watch. Idris Elba is awful on The Office, heartless, and uninteresting, and his presence on the show turns Michael, a character defined by his belief that his employees are as important to him as family members, against the company he loves. Similarly Dwight, whose loyalty to Michael knows no bounds, suddenly has to switch to being a cold disimpassioned salesman. Pam is swept up in the new company conflicts, and in the end, makes no meaningful progress on getting what she wants out of life. By the end, back to normal.
“you can’t have development and always return to square one”
Later seasons of the show desire to raise the stakes so much that you feel tense watching the characters clash, yet like nearly every TV series that came before, it also wants to reset to exactly the same place after the end of every storyline. They want the same characters in the same setting doing the same job - it’s what they established, it’s the success they can fall back on. So in the tiny conflicts like Michael cooking his foot in George Foreman grill, that reset is insignificant, the formula works, and the format can sustain itself. In huge conflicts like Michael and Pam quitting the company, like Dunder-Mifflin being bought out by a company that sells cheap printers, like Jim being promoted to co-manager, like Holly coming into Michael's life to change everything about his motivations, those moments where the show tries to reset to its base state are terrible. The Michael Scott Paper Company is the first of many big decisions the show makes that end up not mattering and therefore end up frustrating viewers. Kathy Bates as boss, James Spader as boss, Nellie as boss - who cares? Nothing sticks. You can’t have development and always return to square one so that whatever story you write in the writers’ room next week will work - it’s a creative lesson TV serieses refuse to learn and has led me to become insanely selective regarding the television I’ll watch.
By seasons six, seven, and eight, The Office had lost far too many of its talented people. With Michael Schur and Steve Carell gone, the show needed new faces to be fresh and interesting and needed old stars to step into bigger roles. While Erin brings a powerful character that fits nicely in the ensemble, they throw her in and out of everyone’s life like a rag-doll because they know she’s the only tool they have to change the circumstances of any story. Pam and Jim are set. They’re done. Dwight, for some reason, they never wanted to make manager, so he’s in an established place. Kelly and Ryan have flip-flopped in their motivations so many times by this point that the only joke left for either of them is to take their erratic behavior to further extremes. So the writers just looked around the room at unmarried characters or ones that hadn’t quit the company dramatically and made their lives more topsy-turvy. Andy is a decent character when he’s a middling salesman. He’s shit as boss. It’s not Ed Helms’s fault. They take him on a roller-coaster ride of being an effective boss, to being an incompetent boss, to being disinterested boss, to being focused on his romance with Erin, to losing interest in that, to being focused on that, to losing interest in that, to being focused on that. Whatever a cappella Cornell-obsessed heartthrob existed in season three gets muddled with whatever the show feels it needs in a given moment. He becomes another victim of character inconsistency. And when, at the end of season eight, in Free Family Portrait Studio, they reuse the exact Michael Scott Paper Company trick, (leaving the company, stealing clients, merging back in) with Andy Bernard, that’s when The Office might as well have filed for creative bankruptcy.
If, by season nine, the final season, Creed Bratton isn’t your favorite character, I don’t understand what you’re watching for. He’s the only one consistently funny, he’s the only one who’s consistently anything, and he’s the only one that manages to stay in the background, which is exactly how the formula that made The Office successful in the beginning works. Knowing the show is coming to an end drew back in some old talent, namely Greg Daniels, and freed the writers up to make some bolder permanent choices. Even still, a lot of those are borderline random. Andy decides one day he wants to be famous and so leaves the company to audition for an American Idol clone. They introduce two new characters for very little reason, including yet another love interest for Erin. Was there a scheduling conflict with Ed Helms? Meredith at one point decides to shave her head while at work. Angela almost becomes homeless after fighting with Oscar regarding his gay affair with her Senator husband. I think Jan rapes someone, but I'm not sure. These are the choices they’re making by the end, continuing the trend of being desperate to make you laugh and shocking you when they no longer know how to make you smile through subtle charm. Most pathetic though is how much they try to rehash the Pam and Jim romance. The whole season is dominated by a forced marital conflict between Pam and Jim, who, in previous seasons, were always willing to devote themselves fully to each other. The reason is obvious. The writers want you to remember their best storyline, which they resolved far too soon way back in seasons two and three. By the end, they’re using current episode footage to show you montages of Pam and Jim moments from years before. “See? See? The Office used to be good. Remember? We still have some of the same actors. See?”
“failure to plan”
Character consistency problems, raising the stakes only to reset the stakes problems, writing by democracy problems, and losing top talent over time problems plague The Office as they have so many shows before it. All of them can be summed up in a single failure though: failure to plan. No one who starts to work on these shows knows how the stories are going to end up. They have to move forward and constantly adapt to shifting circumstances, to choices made by others who may or may not still be working for the show, and without the knowledge of how much longer people are going to want to continue. I cannot overstate the damage this causes, and I find it sad, because The Office is far from the only show that has been ruined like this. Battlestar Galactica only made it two episodes before its failure to plan destroyed it.
For all my grievances and for all my disappointment, serieses also have something magical that makes me reluctant to completely shred them and write them off as worthless. So much time spent with these people means you really get to know about them and when you really get to know people, that’s when you start to care about them. It’s partly why I like stories, and why for me, the deeper the better. In spite of going so far astray, I cared about the fates of Pam and Jim Halpert, of Dwight Schrute, of Kevin, Stanley, Phyllis, Angela, Erin, Meredith, Creed, and Michael Scott. I was so excited to see him come back for Dwight’s wedding and the two lines Carell agreed to deliver are flawless. That man knew what made the show great once, and he knew when to call it quits. By the final minutes, the show steers itself back to what is and always was meaningful. Jim is back to being Jim, Pam is back to being Pam. Ditto the rest. And Dwight is finally rewarded for loving the company he works for more than anyone else in the world. It’s touching, and I’m glad I stuck with it to see those characters to the end of their tales. I just wish it hadn’t been so bad for so much of the journey.
I should thank The Office for years of entertainment and teaching me a great deal about subtle character. Even if it offered nothing else - in the episode Drug Testing, when Jim refuses to speak because of the jinx Pam has on him until he buys her a coke, and he tells her that he loves her with a look across the break room table - even if that was the entirety of value from the show, it would have been worth watching it for all those hours.
