Office life in two worlds.
Beckett might consider an office too familiar, too encoded with generic misery. Just as a commercial about a fretful housewife readies us for a miracle spray, so a commercial set in an office—such as one for FedEx, Sprint Nextel, and countless others—prepares us for jocular scenes of oppression. The ads follow the blueprint established by the “Dilbert” comic strip and by Mike Judge’s 1999 film “Office Space” (where the boss kept dropping by to follow up on “those T.P.S. reports”). At the office, we have come to understand, the boss is always a blustery martinet; abbreviations are a B.F.D.; your co-workers eat your food, talk your ear off, and stab you in the back; and work has no inherent value.
The richest treatment of these themes—and other, more searching considerations—occurred on “The Office,” a BBC Two sitcom whose impact vastly exceeded the length of its run: a mere twelve episodes in 2001-02... their jobs involved monotonous labor at a failing company in a collapsing industry. Like “The Office,” standout workplace sitcoms—including “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “M*A*S*H,” “Taxi,” and “The Larry Sanders Show”—take place at pokey or besieged outfits. A Goldman Sachs sitcom would have to be set in the mailroom, because watching envy and truckling is a lot funnier than watching the distribution of Christmas bonuses.
...The documentary verisimilitude .. allowed scenes to peter out with a blank look or a sigh rather than build up to the American joke-joke-joke crescendo, known as the “blow,” a structure that usually involves someone bellowing at a freshly slammed door, “Does this mean we’re not getting married?”
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Initially, NBC was too respectful. The goings on at the Scranton branch of the Dunder-Mifflin paper company duplicated those at Wernham Hogg scene for scene, which didn’t play to the new writers’ interests or the new cast’s strengths. But in the fall of 2005 the writers, led by Greg Daniels, the co-creator of “King of the Hill,” declared independence, and soon enough the show became a hit, first as a downloaded phenomenon on iTunes and then in the Nielsen ratings. It also became the best sitcom on the air. The creative turning point was last fall’s Halloween episode, in which Dunder-Mifflin’s corporate office in New York tells Michael Scott (the American version of David Brent, played by Steve Carell) to fire an employee by the end of the day. As he loudly struggles to think of a way out, or a way to get someone else to do it, Carell lets us see his character rummaging around in his brain for ideas, rocking forward as if to tip one closer to his mouth. The episode becomes completely goofy when Michael, in costume with a papier-mâché head on his shoulder, persuades his dweeby but Machiavellian lieutenant, Dwight (a brilliantly humorless Rainn Wilson), that the second head is whispering advice about whom to fire.
The winning silliness was new...
The challenge that faced the American “Office” was to honor the spirit of the original while tweaking the workplace dynamics so that audiences would want to watch more than twelve episodes. The British scabrousness and barely suppressed violence is gone, and the Scranton office—brighter and noisier, with more posters, parties, and pep—is Slough on Zoloft. Scranton has its thwarted lovebirds, too, Jim and Pam (the boyishly appealing John Krasinski and a depressed but radiant Jenna Fischer), who are better-looking and more assertive than Tim and Dawn. But two more office romances have been woven into the mix, and where Ricky Gervais’s David was nearly asexual, Steve Carell’s Michael Scott is weirdly and delightfully pansexual. Ryan, the go-getter junior salesman (B. J. Novak, one of several writers on the show who also play characters), tries never to be alone with his boss. It’s not just that Michael slaps him on the rear and calls him on his cell phone to coo but that Michael once proclaimed, when everyone was playing Who Would You Do?, “Well, I would definitely have sex with Ryan!,” adding, a moment late, “ ’cause he’s going to own his own business.” Which makes it perfectly understandable.
Referring to such differences, Kevin Reilly, the president of NBC Entertainment, has remarked that “Americans need a little bit more hope than the British.”
...What distinguishes Dunder-Mifflin from Wernham Hogg is not hope but consolation. In the British “Office,” we never learned most people’s names; the American version lovingly anatomizes everyone and takes advantage of the long-take documentary format to reveal the full complexity of everyone’s feelings (we glean, for instance, that Toby has an unspoken crush on Pam, and therefore resents Jim). Lost is the condemnatory power of the anonymous British chorus; gained are both a standard American melting pot and a commedia-dell’arte stock company, featuring Kelly the Yakker, Meredith the Lush, Kevin the Letch, and Creed the Cantankerous Freak, who is just a possession or two away from being a hobo. When Dwight is hovering uselessly in Michael’s office as Michael tries to deal with the sudden death of his predecessor, who was decapitated in a car accident, Creed (Creed Bratton) suddenly dips in his random oar.
CREED: You know, a human can go on living for several hours after being decapitated.
DWIGHT: You’re thinking of a chicken.
CREED: What’d I say?
It wouldn’t be the same without him. In the final episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” Mary Richards explained the hidden mechanism of our workplace sitcoms, telling her co-workers, “I thought about something last night. What is a family? And I think I know. A family is people who make you feel less alone and really loved. Thank you for being my family.” Somewhat more self-importantly, Michael Scott tells the camera, “A lot of these people, this is the only family they have. So as far as I’m concerned”—he pulls out a “World’s Best Boss” mug that he bought for himself—“this says ‘World’s Best Dad.’ ”
...“Would I rather be feared or loved?” he wonders aloud. “Um, easy: both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.” Steve Carell does wonderful work with his voice, going from strangled and squeaky when he’s wounded to orotund when he’s feeling statesmanlike, an effect routinely shattered by his penchant for cackling and blurting out “Fo’ shizzle!” or “What’s the dealio?” All the conversational lint that tumbles around the airwaves gets trapped on the blank mesh of his brain.
The American show is much more willing to bend reality in the service of a joke. Jim, who sits next to Dwight and is able to tolerate his pettiness only by thinking of ingenious ways to punk him, goes so far as to send him faxes that purport to be time-travelling warnings from “future Dwight”—and Dwight heeds them. But the new “Office” does fix the original’s nagging realism problem: it was difficult to believe that David Brent would have lasted in his job for eight years. The writers take care to demonstrate that Michael Scott’s intense, blundering amiability can close a sale, particularly when the client is drunk. Most of the time, Michael’s boss, Jan Levinson (a splendid Melora Hardin as a steely professional occasionally beset by self-doubt), can’t understand why she hasn’t fired him. But Jan also warms to Michael’s sympathetic side, particularly when she’s drunk.
Michael is too dim to understand that Jan is way out of his league; he sees himself as a sort of man-about-town who’s not afraid to cry. In this vein, he regularly convenes breach-healing colloquia about diversity and tolerance, which always backfire. This fall, he tried to demonstrate that there’s nothing scary about gays by publicly embracing Oscar (Oscar Nuñez), an accountant who he had been told, privately, was gay. (Michael explained to us that he wished he’d known about Oscar’s sexuality, because then he wouldn’t have kept calling him “faggy.” “You don’t call retarded people retards,” he pointed out, with characteristic logic. “It’s bad taste. You call your friends retards when they’re acting retarded. And I consider Oscar a friend.”) Oscar rejected the embrace with a shove, declaring, “I don’t want to touch you—ever consider that? You’re ignorant. And insulting. And small.” Michael’s pained glance at the camera demonstrates Steve Carell’s particular strength as a comic actor: he doesn’t just deliver jokes and P.C. doubletalk—he swaddles them in bubble wrap and adds a gift card. When they don’t go over, he’s crestfallen. Here he ended up crying on Oscar’s shoulder: “Sorry I called you faggy.” Michael wants nothing more than to keep his humiliations to himself. But there are so many.
The biggest humiliation, though he hasn’t yet begun to acknowledge it, is the growing evidence that his office is not exactly a family. Michael’s employees, of course, recognize family metaphors as a corporate falsehood, and they behave accordingly: his wingman, Dwight, recently maneuvered to replace him, having earlier told us that his defining quality as a worker was loyalty—“but if there were somewhere else that valued that loyalty more highly, I’m going wherever they value loyalty the most.”
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Precisely because Jim and Pam’s relationship has been so poignant—it’s the show’s chief ornament—they are fast running out of reasons to stay apart. At the end of last season, Jim approached Pam in the parking lot one night and said, “I’m in love with you.” A few minutes later in the darkened office, a likelier setting, they kissed. Then she said she was still going to marry Roy, her lunk of a fiancé. Yes, it made no sense. This season, even as Pam called off the wedding, Jim left for the Stamford office so that he could forget her; now the merger has brought him back, along with his Stamford colleague and new girlfriend, Karen (a spunky Rashida Jones). Their relationship feels much more mature than Jim and Pam’s skylarking, and so is clearly doomed. How this matter plays out will define the show’s view of office life. Is this “Office” a romance, a place to find your soul’s counterpoint? Or is it a comedy of consolation, a place where dreams of love and Costa Rica gradually slip away? Michael, at least, would argue for the romance. Last season, he urged Jim to “never, ever, ever give up” his pursuit of Pam. It helped, somehow, that Michael uttered this Churchillian sentiment while wearing plastic handcuffs and shivering in the makeshift brig of a booze-cruise boat on Scranton’s Lake Wallenpaupack. The frigid weather and the correctional setting were straight out of the British original; the unlooked-for kindness was a local contribution.
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