A Short Preface:

I recently read an article by Kevin Craft, writing for The Atlantic, with which I staunchly disagree. The title of the article? The Thing That Made The Office Great Is the Same Thing That Killed It.

*cracks knuckles one at a time*

*cracks neck both ways*

*shakes body loose*

Let’s do this.

The Argument in Question:

To begin, Craft writes: “There isn't a more quintessentially American form of relaxation than...turning on the tube. After all, what better way to take your mind off of the job you left just a few hours earlier than by watching a TV show?” He goes on to explain how The Office took this idea of television as a respite from office drudgery, and flipped that relationship on its head by turning the object of escape into the subject of the show: namely, having a crappy job, with a crappy boss, became the entertainment. Craft believes that, “The original theme it explored — office work sucks — is only funny if the characters never grow. What made the early episodes so dryly funny and morbidly relatable was that the seasons and the names of the meetings changed, but the paper-pushing remained the same,” and that, “the show's characters at first didn't develop as much as stagnate.” In summary, Craft asserts, “The Office's characters developed, and their individual stories gradually outshone the show's focus on survival in a corporate setting,” and eventually, “While such plot twists made sense from the standpoint of character development, they took the focus away from the monotony of everyday paper salesmanship and failed to generate the same exceptionally effective situational humor.”

Here’s the original article, if you’re interested.

The Issues:

There are three main problems I spot with Craft’s argument. The first is mistakes the show’s signature humor as situational, when in reality most of the humor in the show — from the start — is born from idiosyncratic characters conjuring incredibly peculiar situations: not the other way around. This ties in with the second issue I have with Craft’s essay, which is that The Office is not, as Craft suggests, an attempt at, “ma[king] its audience feel better about their professional lives by showcasing a workplace with even drabber décor and more grating co-workers:” The Office is not just a bag of chocolate for the everyday, depressed office worker. The humor in The Office centers around passions that are either ignored, misdirected, poorly actualized, misinterpreted, or taken to the extreme. This brings up the third and final issue I have with Craft’s essay, which is that he assumes the show is only supposed to be a comedy show: on the contrary, it has a dramatic edge, it explores social themes, questions conventions, presents several very intriguing relationships, and, at points, can be tragically sad. There is a longing beneath the writing and acting of the show — a passion, a hope — to step outside of the apathy we’ve become accustomed to: to re-evaluate the way we perceive work, the people who occupy it, and the value of boredom amidst a sea of potential distractions.

Disanalogy #1:

A great counter-example that disproves all the main points of Craft’s essay would be the famous cold opening to the Stress Relief episode: wherein Dwight starts a fake fire in the office, in order to test their emergency preparedness, and total chaos ensues. SPOILER: Oscar climbs into, and falls out of, the ceiling; Kevin loots a vending machine; Michael throws a chair out a window and starts screaming wildly for help; Jim and Andy use the copier as a battering ram; and at the very end of the opening — when Dwight is announcing that this is all just a drill — Stanley has a serious heart attack right in the middle of the office floor, to which Dwight says, “Oh come on. It’s not real, Stanley. Don’t have a heart attack.” END SPOILER. (I didn’t want to ruin it any more than I already have, and it is worth watching even if you aren’t an Office fan because of how good the writing is: here’s the link.)

This is probably one of my favorite scenes out of all the television comedy shows I’ve ever watched, simply because of the speed with which the oddly believable chaos takes off, and the ways in which that chaos grows and develops. The opening was remarked upon by many critics for how solid the writing was, and actually received a Primetime Emmy for best writing in a comedy show. This episode came midway through the 5th season, and essentially disproves Craft’s entire argument: there are many openings and other bits that escalate in a similar fashion throughout the series, both before and after this season. From the beginning, the characters’ lives were directly connected to the show’s humor, and the problems in the office were almost all caused because of their personalities. This is because, as opposed to strictly situational comedy as Craft assumed, The Office is situational comedy totally founded upon the humorous collection of personalities gathered in within the office. The escalation of normal situations, or the creation of absurd situations initiated more often than not by the strange quirks of the characters, is where The Office’s funniness really comes from (such as the Basketball Game season 1, Booze Cruise season 2, Gay Witch Hunt season 3, and Dinner Party season 4, and Koi Pond season 6, to name a few): not from a realistic portrayal of office life.

From the beginning, The Office is filled with unrealistic time-wasting and distractions, trips outside the office, and are often either spurred on by Michael’s need to be liked or Jim’s indifference towards working at Dunder Mifflin. The best humor in the series works to characterize each member of the large cast: the situational comedy, and the dialogue, only gets better throughout the season because the eccentric/inappropriate actions of characters like Michael slowly become normalized. Craft is wrong when he says that the later seasons lose interest in exploring how to live in a corporate setting: if anything, like wine, later seasons of The Office show us how to survive in even the most brutally bizarre and quickly changing corporate settings (Sabre, Will Farrell, Robert California, Andy Bernard, Nellie Bertram, David Wallace, etc. etc.). When it comes right down to it, Craft’s argument is based on the incorrect assertion that the humor in The Office is only good when it is poking fun at how bad office work sucks and how boring it is and how we need to find some way to escape it, kind of thing: which is not only not the point of the show, but is also incredibly reductive (especially considering the show took 9 seasons to tell the tale of Jim and Pam (which in my opinion really did need the full 9 seasons to be fully explored (see miscellaneous, if interested))). The Office tries to give us respite from our days in the real office, not by belittling our efforts or making existential pokes at our toiling or by saying none of it matters: but by showing us how important the people we work with are, by showing the collective camaraderie that is established necessarily between coworkers in an office space, and by showing us that in even the most hellish of jobs or situations, there is always something we can find to empathize with, or to feel passionate about, or find interest in — in the worst circumstances, the only way to survive is to search for the most meager of scraps, or die without having tried. It’s funny, but Craft actually made the main counter-argument against his own essay when he wrote, “by the show's second season, its creators had found an original voice—a more optimistic take on work and life than that of the acerbic British series.” And it was this original voice, this slight hint of optimism mixed in with the irony and skepticism, that Craft chose to ignore, which allowed the characters to act at once absurd and to pop off the screen as real, feeling, breathing, passionate, loving, human beings.

Epilogue in C Major: Disanalogy #2 — Plot Tracking (honestly, probably a bit too much (bordering on unnecessary (like, almost maybe a weird amount (to the point where, unless you are a GIANT fan of The Office, I would advise you to just go ahead and turn around and skip this and go do something more productive with what little time you’re allotted on this beautiful spinning rock of ours))) Along With Some Philosophical Ramblings:

Jim and Pam’s relationship is one of the best examples of the type of change brought about by passion and love. In the first season, the basketball game, for instance, Jim is not very happy to be playing when he first hears about it. But then he learns he will be facing off against Pam’s fiancee Roy, and says, “I’m looking forward to playing. I think I’ll impress a few people in here.” Up until this point in the show, Jim had only acted as the apathetic, skate-through-life sort of character that is typical of many postmodern television comedies; he was the cool guy of the show because he was too cool to care about anything. He spent his time pulling pranks on Dwight, goofing off with Pam, and in general trying very little at his job — he had no plans for his life whatsoever — before Pam and him became friends. Pam is the reason he starts trying hard, and when he does start trying harder (like in Basketball Game or Office Olympics) we start to see that Jim has some pretty stellar potential: he is a natural leader, and a great organizer, talented. But, as Pam observes, his skills are being wasted at Dunder Mifflin, and his brilliance only gets to glow when he is pranking Dwight, talking with Pam, or goofing off with the rest of the office: his job is too easy, and he is too unsatisfied to stay and too unmotivated to get a different job. Jim is confronted with the quickly approaching wedding of Pam, who seems to be passive aggressively nudging him away from Scranton, at the same time he is being scolded for the hundreds of complaints filed by Dwight for all the pranks. He realizes exactly how much time he has wasted working here, and decides he must leave, because, “I have no future here.” This is a result of being stuck in a dead end job, and not being able to be with Pam. During one of his last weeks at Scranton, during the episode Casino Night, Jim reveals his true emotions to Pam, who is still engaged to Roy, and they kiss: afterwards, Pam says she can’t be with Jim, though she clearly wants to be with him. This is the closest they are able to get to one another, though: Jim’s hands slip out of Pam’s, they look at each other one last time, and Jim walks away.

The next episode kicks off season three, which begins with Jim, who has left Dunder Mifflin Scranton to work at Dunder Mifflin Stamford, after revealing his love to Pam and being rejected. Once Jim arrives in Stamford, he enters an interesting phase as a character where he begins trying to block out who he really is as a person: he begins dating Karen, stops pulling pranks at work, and begins actually working hard. When Jim and Karen both end up moving back to Dunder Mifflin Scranton after the closing of the Stamford branch, Jim goes through a period of self-denial: he is trying to ignore the feelings he clearly still has for Pam, by remaining committed to Karen, and keeping a wall up between him and Pam’s friendship. You can tell that Jim is almost getting his revenge on Pam, at this point: he has been hurt, and he is — unaware or otherwise — hurting Pam in the same way she hurt him.

Jim is the first to try and make reparations with Pam: later in the day, after refusing to pull a prank on Dwight with her, Jim sets Andy up to prank Pam by asking her out with the sayings and date ideas that she most hates — showing Pam that he has not forgotten. From this point, though, there is more conflict between Pam and Jim when each of them seems to be trying to hurt each other by being in relationships with other people — Pam starts seeing Roy again, which is clearly more a ploy to get Jim back for his relationship with Karen, which is clearly just a ploy to get back at Pam for rejecting him. This type of passive aggression continues to escalate between the two, and works to showcase the ways in which passive, apathetic living often ends up keeping us further away from the very person/thing that might be able to relieve our apathy. When Pam finally decides to tell her first truth it is to Roy, who she tells she kissed Jim. At this point in Jim and Pam’s relationship, there is a divide: a seemingly permanent wall is now between them, and even their passive aggressive signalling stops altogether.

It comes down to a job interview that Michael, Karen and Jim have all applied for at corporate, in New York. If Jim gets the job, he moves to New York, and Karen said she would move with him: and, if Karen gets it, he said that he would move with her. The interview with David Wallace, CEO, is going incredibly well, up until the question, “What did you like most about Scranton?”

This interview is interwoven with an interview with Pam back at Dunder Mifflin Scranton, sitting alone in the conference room with the documentary crew, where she is sure that Jim is going to get the job because he’s so qualified, and because everybody loves him.

At this point — ready to move to New York either way, trying to put Scranton behind him — Jim seemed taken aback. He angled his eyes down, and thought for a second: “The friendships.” Wallace followed up the question with, “Well, we’re looking for a guy who can stick around for the long haul: so, where do you see yourself in ten years?”

Pam tells the camera, seemingly genuinely, that, “If he never comes back again, that's okay. We're friends. And I'm sure we'll stay friends. We just, we never got the timing right. You know, I shot him down, and then he did the same to me, and, but, you know what? It's okay. I'm totally fine. Everything is going to be totally....”

But at that very moment, Jim bursts in through the door: he excuses himself to the cameraman, turns to Pam, and asks what she’s doing this Friday. Pam says, “Uhh, nothing. Totally free.” And Jim grins a big grin, taps the door a few times, and replies, “It’s a date:” and we are left with a shot of Pam smiling ridiculously wide, sitting in the interview chair, asking, “What’s the question, again?”

This same the same pattern of anger, passive aggression, putting things on the line, and coming back together is repeated in the later seasons with the other major conflict between Pam and Jim — Jim takes a job in Philadelphia without telling Pam. The series ends on a hopeful note: a year after Jim chose to stay in Scranton, Pam sells the house without telling Jim, and tells him that she is ready to move on with him and start his business. But, the reason it’s important that the relationship between Jim and Pam continued past their marriage is because without further exploration, the love story between Jim and Pam that was central to The Office’s success would have been unresolved in several major ways. If Pam and Jim were to have gotten married, and that were the end of the show, their characters would have been severely lacking in dimension: it would not only seem too good to be true, it wouldn’t make sense for the characters. By the time they are together, we already know of several potential conflicts that have not been resolved between Pam and Jim: mainly Jim’s dishonesty about buying the house, and Pam’s inability to pass art school. They both still have a ton of growing up to do, even after their second child together, several years of marriage, and 30+ years of life. This is perhaps the most beautiful thing about the relationship between Jim and Pam: that it never turns into just “another happy marriage” because “just another happy marriages” are hell. Ultimately, being in a relationship, loving someone, without any passion or risk, is tantamount to being dead on your feet: you are either wasting your time being miserable, or wasting someone else’s time being miserable. Lying to yourself to maintain something is just as unhealthy as not chasing after the thing that pulls your heart the most: The Office gives reasons why it is important to pay attention to ourselves, to the things around us, to how we feel, and why we feel that way, and to really take the time to listen to ourselves, these cavernous bodies, and go after whatever echoes call the clearest.