The Office – Why so serious?

Today’s Office review doubles as a guest clack by Wally Holland: “twice-over MIT grad, freelance writer, balding, awesome. I write the way Barack Obama plays basketball: goofy, a little awkward sometimes, but the guy’s basically the black Jesus so WHO CARES HOW HE PLAYS BASKETBALL.”

(Season 5, Episode 10 – “Moroccan Christmas”)

The Office plays nontraditional games with old-fashioned pieces; this week’s episode, maybe the most oddly-shaped of the show’s whole run and certainly the darkest-toned of a dark season, is a strong example.

The “festive holiday episode,” in which the folks dress up and act genially weird (like “Benihana Christmas,” any of several field-trip episodes in Seasons two to four) turns into a “foolish boss leads very uncomfortable group ritual” episode – standard Office fare really, indeed a canonical office-sitcom setup. Meanwhile, the sideplots feature Dwight being a jerk (version #561) and Phyllis tormenting Angela a little bit — nothing radical there, just hitting the notes the fans need, really. And to top it all off you get another Meredith-is-a-drunk-yay! plot point to ruin everyone’s holiday.

But the writers played two neat tricks this week, one structural and one tonal. The former is pretty simple: the “B story” featuring Phyllis and Angela ended up being the centerpiece of the show, revealing Angela and Dwight’s affair and signaling a pretty big change in the emotional weather of the office (will Angry Andy return?).

The writers even gave the show an extra-long tag (the final minute) to draw out the pain and suffering. It was all traditional Office politics until that moment when sweet ol’ Phyllis turned around and unloaded both barrels. It was a comeuppance richly deserved, but also a charged, dangerous moment for the show, as its most morally icky plotline culminated with the adorably mean Angela squirming and crying, not only humiliated but attacked, defenseless — a very public hypocrite. Hey it’s on TV; it’s funny!

Meanwhile the nominal “A story” — Meredith accidentally sets herself on fire, Michael holds an intervention and takes her to rehab — trailed off into nothing at the end. The clinic wouldn’t even take her (which is funny but really isn’t funny at all)! Meredith got no funny lines during the big office meeting; she just loudly, obnoxiously insisted she’s not an alcoholic, over and over again. I don’t get invited to any of the cool interventions, but that scene had the maddening ring of truth to it, most especially in the daring choice to be, um, unfunny.

The writers have played Meredith’s drinking for bitter comedy over the years, so the audience expected jokes to keep the she’s-a-drunk sequence a little absurd … Nothin’. Total dissatisfaction as aesthetic mode. Where have TV audiences seen that before?

Right. Greg Daniels’ show has grown this year to have more in common with its British source material than with its own melodramatic middle episodes, the run from “Casino Night” through “The Job” that was the show’s somewhat more traditional-sitcom-like glory year, full of field trips (the beach!), heavy plot twists (Jim’s gone! He’s back!), and tear-jerker displays of hidden humanity (Michael comes to Pam’s show!). The melodramatic peaks are all but gone, replaced with the simmering resentments, periodic relapses, and ballsy anticlimaxes explored by that other formally-unsettling surrogate-family sitcom, The Sopranos, with a shot of the hellish desperation of Gervais and Merchant’s original British series.

This year Dunder-Mifflin has felt a little bit squalid: the unsettling Dwight/Angela wedding (think of “wedding” as a verb, not a noun, and you’ll see how creepy that sequence was); Jan’s postpartum cruelty; Phyllis’s blackmail; Ryan and Kelly’s off-putting reunion; even Jim and Pam’s slide into domestic “bliss” in … Scranton, a town they (perhaps justifiably) hate. And as Steve Carrell’s lead performance as Michael gets deeper and more affecting, Michael seems to grow smaller and smaller, yelling ineffectually at David (his boss), losing a decent shot at romance, sinking back into routine instead of traipsing about the countryside to save the company.

The Office, improbably, is more real than ever before, and consequently less funny. Too bad for Michael and company, and too bad for those who turn on NBC to get away from their troubles (they can watch the silly fantasy of 30 Rock).

Lucky for the rest of us.

Clacked by Debbie McDuffee
on Dec 14, 2008 @ 13:06 EST5EDT