Sunday, November 20, 2011

Take This Job and Shove It (or: Things I Wish Jim Halpert had Said Five Years Ago)

By Josh Corman

Evidently, the show was nearly reworked as Law & Order: Scranton
Editor's Note: My original post contained one inexplicable sentence in which no complete thought was expressed. Also, I said that Pam went away to art school in season four, when it was season five. I regret the errors, and both have been corrected, but mostly I regret that Jonny and Emily gave me unmonitored editorial control while they soaked in Ahnold's hot tub.

I was shelving DVDs the other day and stopped when I came across the cover for our copy of season one of The Office. Right under Steve Carell's feet, in big bold letters, is a blurb from Entertainment Weekly that says, "Smart, biting 9-to-5 satire!" I shook my head sadly. Once (seasons one through three), that statement described a big part of what The Office was: a snappy, focused, if not terribly inventive, mockery of the corporate workplace. Now (although I'll confess to only having watched intermittently this season, I have seen every episode of the first eight), not so much.

Look, I know it's becoming fashionable to bash The Office. Other shows have grown more hip (Modern Family and Parks and Recreation, the latter of which evolved from a lackluster copycat of The Office into the only I-have-to-watch-this show on NBC's Thursday lineup), and when Steve Carell left - or, really, when they brought in Will Ferrell for his four episode guest spot - the show basically handed its critics (especially fans who had grown restless with the show's increasingly hit-or-miss episodes) a get out of jail free card. That said, just because it's easy to take shots at the show doesn't mean that it's wrong.

So where did The Office go wrong? It isn't as simple as pointing to a single event, episode, or even season. The show has degenerated, but even now the occasional sparks of life leap off the screen, and the flaws that have turned it from "must see" to totally optional have, for the most part, worked slowly.

Let's start at the beginning.

In one of The Office's first season episodes, Jim Halpert says something to the effect of, "This is my job, not my career. If I thought this was my career, I'd throw myself in front of a moving train." What else could we do but agree with him? Life at Dunder-Mifflin was one series of awkward, unpleasant, and frustrating trials after another. This was the essence of the show's British iteration: these people hate their jobs, they don't care for each other, and their boss might be the most unlikeable human being on earth. Simply put, they are miserable. The American Office carried some of that spirit into its first episodes, as Jim's sentiment makes clear. Over time, that has changed, and the further the show has strayed from that philosophical nest, the weaker it's become.

Basically, in the show's first two seasons, Jim and Pam serve as the audience's anchors in a basically unbearable work environment. Beneath all the witty writing and finely tuned characters was a simple large-scale conflict between the drudgery of working at a place like Dunder-Mifflin and the hope that:

A. Jim and Pam would get together, and

B. Jim and Pam would then do what they really wanted to do with their lives.

See, the audience sees themselves as normal, decent, and sane. So, when they see Dunder-Mifflin each week, the idea is that the criticisms that Jim and Pam see (and that the show makes continuously, explicitly and implicitly) in their office are the very same kinds of criticisms that normal, decent, sane people would make. Jim and Pam are us, and if that's the case, a huge part of our rooting interest in their relationship is the hope that they will escape this place that they (and we) dislike so much, because that's what we would want for ourselves.

Obviously, point A happened. Jim and Pam's relationship was artfully developed for three seasons (unsurprisingly, the show's best run). Their relationship is revealed at the beginning of season four, at which point the writers had a problem to confront: with Jim and Pam together, the show's central tension was relieved, and something equally important (or as close as could be managed) would have to replace it. Cue point B: Pam goes away to Pratt in New York to chase her dream of becoming a professional artist. We root for this, because, frankly, we think Pam is "better" than her position as a secretary at a mid-level paper supply firm. Season five is wrought with authentic tension, mainly due to Jim and Pam's separation and a brief story arc concerning Pam's new friends and Jim's budding jealousy.

Then, Jim proposes. Pam accepts. A short time later, she flunks out of art school. This is where the show started to lose its way. When Pam returns to Scranton (as she had to, unless both she and Jim left the show), the whole "art school" storyline is revealed for what it was: a wholly contrived source of tension that the writers used to lead on the audience by teasing the audience into thinking that they might actually get to see one of the few characters that they could actually root for achieve her dreams. Pam then goes right back to her job as a secretary, and all of Pam's aspirations are brushed under the rug with a cursory conversation with Jim about how Pam's an artist no matter what Pratt says. By that point, I don't know if the show even bothered to hint about Jim's possible aspirations anymore.

Basically, the writers deceived the audience into believing that Jim an Pam, our office-dwelling avatars, might actually resolve their issues with Dunder-Mifflin by leaving it behind and pursuing lives that aren't anchored there.

I might be accused of callously tying Jim and Pam's identities too strongly into their jobs, and thereby missing some larger point about how sometimes things like this just happen, that people get stuck in jobs they don't love and make the best of it. The biggest problem with that criticism is that the show's entire premise is that these main characters' identities are tied into their jobs. That Jim wants desperately for this not to be the case early in the first season is proof enough of that.

Once Jim and Pam were together, engaged, and in the same place, they (by rule of the Sitcom Ten Commandments for Shows Lasting More than Five Years) had to get married and have a kid. At this point, The Office still produced big laughs, and reliably entertained every Thursday. Occasionally, you might even witness a truly hilarious moment or storyline (Jan singing "Son of a Preacher Man" to her infant daughter, or Toby's exit interview with Michael), but the dynamic of the show had strayed so far from that of it's first couple of seasons, that though it entertained, it had lost the potential to stay great.

It had been great, that much is certain. But the moment that Dunder-Mifflin's cast of characters stopped seeing their workplace as something to overcome, and merely something to humorously cope with, it became just another well-written, smart show in the vein of The Big Bang Theory. Now, when I watch Dwight grope at Jim's crotch to see if he has an erection to test his attraction to a new female co-worker,  I cringe.


Am I being too hard on The Office? Possibly. It is, after all, just a TV show, a half-hour comedy that has been, for much of its time on air, head and shoulders, above almost all of its competition. But those few seasons built a foundation that the rest of the show just hasn't quite seen out. Maybe it couldn't have. Maybe I invested too much and, no matter what, I was destined to be let down.

If so, then I am in the wrong, and as I sit at work tomorrow, grinding away at the job I didn't think I'd have for more than a couple of years, thinking about what it will be like to leave that place behind, I'll try to find it in my heart to forgive Jim Halpert.

By Josh Corman

3 comments:

Luke Dornbush said...

Great post. Something definitely went wrong when Pam went away to New York.

I often point out that this was also the first time the show broke from it's established timeline (something that, to me, was a sign of a deeper disregard for what made the show great). What do I mean?

Maybe some of you noticed it too. Between each of the previous seasons, the summer happened. The time the show was on hiatus ACTUALLY HAPPENED and we were left to catch up on the 3 months we missed. When Jim confessed his feelings for Pam at the end of season 2, we didn't pick up the next day with him cleaning out his desk. We caught up with them months later; after his move to Stanford, and after Pam and Roy called off their wedding (we missed both of those major events). The timeline was s strict 1:1 (it's why their Christmas episodes lining up with Christmas worked). When the show wasn't on, it gave the illusion that things continued to happen at the office over the summer.

That summer, between seasons 4 and 5 (your season count is off btw), they broke this pattern and ruined their continuity. Pam goes off to New York for 3 months (perfect, we'll get back to the show right around when she gets back). Wrong! As you mentioned, she proceeds to spend several months in New York during the fall, despite it being a summer program (please note that the season 5 Christmas episode corresponds to roughly September on the show's timeline based on the program dates THEY GAVE US). As you pointed out, it was purely to tease and was completely contrived. It was a betrayal of what made the show great.

I point at that decision as where the show went wrong. I don't think that change corresponding with the dropoff of the show is a coincidence. As I said, it wasn't the decision itself that was the problem, it was just a symptom of a larger mindset that set the show down an increasingly mediocre path.

Rick and Christy Durrance said...

Great insights! I agree with most all of them: especially your view of Parks and Rec!!

Elizabeth Turner said...

I tend to think that an HR, bureaucratic-ish problem is to blame: they hired and added too many new writers once the show became a commercial success (cf. more and more populated writers' panels at events)...with the pressure to include more jokes per episode, the show lost its unique trait: silence. Seasons 1-3 had little dialogue compared to later episodes, depending largely on facial expressions, glances, footage of a copy machine running. The voice got diluted, the silence disappeared, and now the show feels like a frenetic attempt to throw slapstick gags and jokes at viewers, rather than depending on audience intelligence to appreciate the subtle dark humor White-Out and Hi-Liter's.
Did a studio Office kill the writing of The Office by bringing a bunch of new people on board? I'm inclined to think so.
Not even The Office is immune to interference from Corporate.