Like an aging star athlete NBC’s The
Office has fallen down on its way to first numerous times as it
played out it’s final seasons. Like Willie with the Mets, Michael
Jordan with the Wizards, Jerry Rice with the Seahawks, or Rickey
Henderson with the Mets, Mariners, Padres, Red Sox, Dodgers, Newark
Bears, et. al., sometimes the greats just can’t call it quits and
hang around too long.
The last two seasons of The Office
have been pretty close to an unmitigated disaster. Ever since Steve
Carell’s Michael Scott found love and left the Dunder Mifflin
Paper Company (“the people person's paper people”) for Colorado,
the show didn’t really seem to know what to do with itself. Like a
great athlete in decline, it was occasionally able to show a flash of
what once made it great, but the flashes were few and far too brief.
From the bizzaro creeper antics of James Spader’s Robert
California, to the ill-conceived promotion of Andy to Regional
Manager and effectively turning him into a Michael Scott clone (and a
poor one at that), to this seasons manufactured Halpert Family Crisis
that couldn’t have felt more like a manufactured crisis if the show
had been titled The Factory instead of The Office, the
show that had once been a pacesetter, now seemed like a broken down
old clunker. Perhaps Michael Scott put it best, speaking unknowingly
prophetically:
But despite it’s fall from grace over
the past two or three seasons, I still watch it every week. Though
now I’m hoping to be surprised by some genuinely funny
moment, no longer expecting it. I saw a commenter on a bulletin
board explain it this way. It's like visiting a grandparent in a
nursing home. You hope it'll be like old times but know it won't be
as they’re just a shadow of their former self. But you visit
because you love them and remember all the good times you had. And
even though its not what you hope for or remember you're glad you
came. That sums it up about perfectly.
My wife and I loved The Office.
We watched it every week, and usually together. Back in those early
days, and this is really silly, we both even had TV crushes on Jim
and Pam. Her for Jim, me for Pam, just so we’re clear. I was
friends with Jenna Fischer and Robert R. Shafer (Bob Vance, Vance
Refrigeration) on MySpace and actually interacted with them.
Robert’s a big Angels fan, like me. I remember how revolutionary
it looked the first time I saw it. I had never seen it’s forebear,
Rickey Gervais’ original BBC version, and loved the mockumentary
style. I loved how it focused on these small moments for the big
laughs. A throw away comment there, a sideways glance there, an
awkward pause pretty much everywhere. It was so fresh and so
brilliant. This is almost too geeky to admit, but I penned a little
parody script to be acted out with my co-workers and friends in
various roles and shot part of the opening credit sequence. Unlike
Threat Level Midnight, the rest remains mercifully un-filmed
and incomplete.
The writing was superb, but the cast
was perfect. Carell never won an Emmy for playing Michael Scott,
which is kind of inexplicable when you consider he made a bumbling,
obnoxious neurotic who took a lack of self-awareness to soaring new
highs lows and suffered from a near terminal case of
foot-in-mouth disease, appear equally as sympathetic and lovable.
Carell’s brilliance was even more apparent when he left the show
after Season 7 and, as mentioned earlier, the writers tried to turn
Ed Helms’ Andy “Nard Dawg” Bernard into Michael Scott 2.0.
There can be only one Michael Scott, and Steve Carell is he.
John Krasinski and Jenna Fischer had
such natural onscreen chemistry as Jim and Pam that it was almost
hard to remember they were not in fact real people in a real
relationship. They both have the chops to play funny and romantic,
often at the same time, in a way better than I’ve ever seen. Their
arc this season has been much debated, some praising the marital
strife to show not even the Halperts have a perfect storybook
relationship. Others, and I’m probably more in this camp,
bemoaning it as a manufactured crisis to whip up some quick drama to
breath some semblance of life into a dying franchise using its two
most popular remaining characters. Maybe it’s not so much the
concept of throwing a monkey wrench into Jim and Pam’s world I
didn’t like, but the clunky execution. If they had stuck with just
the Athlead/move-to-Philly storyline and skipped the whole Brian the
sound guy angle, it may have come off a lot smoother and natural.
Jim has, after all, had a penchant for making big decisions without
filling in Pam on the details over the years and some other
groundwork for Jim’s itchy feet had been laid this season when the
Halperts attended Roy’s wedding to find him doing extremely well
for himself. At any rate, everything was resolved in a satisfying
way and Krasinski and Fischer were terrific in the finale (more on
that later).
And what can you say about Rainn Wilson
as Dwight K. Schrute? The beet farming, head-banging, paper loving,
power hungry, grandson to a Nazi war criminal grandmutter. It would
be easy to say that Dwight was not a realistic character, but having
worked in an office with a real life person not that far off from
Dwight, I have to concur with Jim in his warning to Young Jim that
Dwight is “very real.” Wilson is the perfect moon-faced actor to
play Dwight. Even with Dwight’s aggressive weirdness, Wilson was
able to bring out his human qualities, whether it was the hurt after
his breakup with Angela, or in watching his relationships with Jim
and Pam evolve from adversarial to almost sibling-esque.
Those are the core four, so to speak,
but The Office was home to a whole stable of great characters
and actors who played them. Andy, the songbird with daddy issues and
maligned (by character and critic alike) regional manager; grumpy,
crossword master Stanley; know-it-all-Oscar; mysterious weirdo Creed;
matronly-with-a-wild-streak Phyllis; severe cat-lover Angela; the
narcissistic totally-wrong-yet-totally-right-for-each-other duo of
Ryan and Kelly; high functioning alcoholic and
rabies survivor Meredith; little orphan Erin; warehouse to penthouse
Darryl; lovable doofus and Cup o’ Noodle connoisseur Kevin; put
upon sad sack Toby; Roy, Nellie, Plop, Todd Packer, David Wallace,
Jan Levinson (I presume), Charles Miner, Katie the purse girl….I
could go on and on.
The reason we notice the sometimes
precipitous declines of great athletes and TV shows is that they were
great enough to hang around a long time in the first place and had
reached the highest highs from which to fall. In the declining years
we always say we wish they had called it quits earlier so we could
have remembered them when they were at their best. But the truth is
once they do finally hang it up and just a little bit of time has
passed, the great moments far outweigh the bad. And maybe it was
worth watching the deteriorating skills to catch those last few
moments of greatness.
The Office finale was one such
moment. Series finale’s are a tricky animal. Expectations are so
high, especially for a show so beloved and hailed as The Office
has been during it’s run (recent seasons not withstanding), they
are almost impossible to live up to. The Office finale isn’t
perfect, but it comes pretty darn close.
(If you haven’t watched it yet and
you care, tread lightly beyond this point. Thar be spoilers ahead!)
The finale takes place about a year
after the previous episode, which saw Dwight finally reach the career
and personal pinnacles he always dreamed of: Regional Manager of
Dunder Mifflin Scranton and engaged to Angela. Many of the
Scrantonites have moved on to other things; Kevin and Toby were
fired; Stanley retired; Andy became a renown laughing stock thanks to
a viral video of his mental breakdown at a singing contest audition;
Nellie moved to Poland; Darryl is doing well working for Athlead (now
called Athleap); Creed is on the lam from the authorities. The PBS
documentary about Dunder Mifflin aired during the previous episode,
and the doc crew is back in town to get the gang back together for a
panel discussion. Dwight and Angela’s wedding is the next day.
So there’s the setup.
What we get is a great last ride, that
hit all the right notes. It may have hit a few extra we could have
done without, but all the ones you’d want and expect were there.
It was funny, it was sweet, it was poignant, it was emotional, but
most of all it felt like The Office.
First the few things I wasn’t too
keen on.
- The reuniting of Erin with her birth parents. The orphan Erin storyline has always been sort of a D storyline in the show, so I thought this sudden resolution of it was a reach and a bit of a manipulative trick to squeeze out some easy tears. Sure, Erin’s parents could have seen her on the documentary, I guess, and made the journey to Scranton to reveal themselves to her, but who would actually do that in a public forum like that? I know, I know, it’s a TV show and they’re giving everyone their happy ending, but still, it seemed forced to me. That said, while I may not have loved the idea, the execution was great. Joan Cusack was really good as Erin’s mom and the rest of the cast’s reaction once they realized what was happening before Erin did was very authentic. So, bad idea, good execution.
- Andy, Andy, Andy. Poor Andy. He’s been bashed enough I suppose. But let’s get one last lick in. Thanks to the Internet, Andy has finally achieved world wide fame. Just, not the kind he wanted. Now known the globe over as Baby Wawa thanks to his waterworks displayed at the singing contest audition, Andy managed to parlay that into a job at Cornell. Huh? The seniors invited him to speak at commencement week as a joke, but he shocked everyone when he actually delivered a moving address and was able to poke fun at himself. Mmmmm-kay. I know, TV show, happy ending, blah, blah, blah. I guess this Andy is just such a far cry from the Andy we first met in Season 3, everything he does sorta bothers me. He used to be a pretty good character, but that ship sailed long before he did for the Bahamas. Which, not coincidentally, was when this season’s better episodes aired (other than the last two).
- You wouldn’t think a baby abandonment storyline would make it’s way into a sit-com series finale, but it managed to here. While it is completely in line with the characters, self-centered Ryan and Kellie, for them to abandon Ryan’s baby at Dwight and Angela’s wedding reception in a fit of lusty passion, it’s a pretty bold move. The baby did end up in the hands of Nellie, who wants to adopt it, but the whole incident was just odd.
But these are minor gripes. Overall, I
thought the episode was great.
The Office was at its best when
it blended biting comedy with heart, and while the finale had more
heart then bite, it was just about the perfect balance given the
circumstances. Here are some of the highlights, in my, oh so humble
opinion:
- I thought the writers did a nice job of giving Pam a forum to explain her reservations about moving to Philly. Yes, Jim jumped in with two-feet without cluing her in on his move to Athlead, but Pam sorta came off like a dream crusher for parts of the season. So, giving her the chance to give her reasons at the PBS Q & A was a nice touch.
- Along with that, and going back to the episode before, I’m glad they never revealed what was in the card Jim took out of the Christmas box back in Season 2. It never could have lived up to expectations and was better left unsaid.
- Sticking with Pam, giving her the last line of the series was the perfect coda. The Office was as much about Pam’s journey as anybody’s, so I was glad she got the last word.
- And still sticking with Pam, and Jim, I thought they resolved the will-they-won’t-they-move arc very well. Even though after the previous episode Jim seemed more than happy to leave Athlead and stay in Scranton and the finale takes place a year later and he still seems content, if they had actually stayed I don’t know I would’ve assumed the Halpert’s would always have a happy ending. I mean, honestly what reason do they have to stay in Scranton? So, I thought they resolved it in a convincing way and now I know Jim and Pam will live happily ever after.
- Dwight’s bachelor party was pretty great. And anytime we get more Mose it’s a good thing.
- Everything about Michael’s appearance was perfect. From his first line (“That’s what she said,” as if it could have been anything else), to learning of his many children, and his only other line about his kids growing up and marrying each other, it was just the right amount of Michael. He already had his farewell, and it wouldn’t have been fair to overshadow the rest of the casts’ goodbye, but it also wouldn’t have felt right if he wasn’t there for Dwight’s wedding.
- There were a lot of great call-backs. Dwight rehiring Devon who Michael fired in Season 2; Carol as the real estate agent handling the sale of Jim and Pam’s house; the same stripper for Dwight’s bachelor party as for Bob Vance’s in Season 4; Creed saying he still has his yogurt lid medal from the office Olympics. I’m always a sucker for that kind of stuff in TV shows and movie series. It makes the made up worlds seem real when the same secondary and tertiary characters reappear.
- In true Office fashion, just when things looked like they were going to cross the line into sappy, a great joke would come to the rescue. Like when Kevin told Oscar he thought he was gay because he was crying, or Dwight speaking fondly of his co-workers, then correcting himself; his underlings.
- What made The Office finale unique, was the documentary conceit made it possible for the characters to reflect on their years together in a way that seemed realistic and not a trite TV trope. Like in many a series finale, the characters waxed eloquent about the time they spent together and the changes in each other and themselves. But since they were speaking to a documentary crew, it was more believable then if two characters were just talking to each other about all the great times they had over these past nine years. Because who really does that? Jim, Pam, Dwight, Phyllis and the rest really could look back at the footage and see themselves change over the years, just like the fans could. To me it really captured, or recaptured maybe, that feeling The Office had in those early seasons that made these people seem real.
It’s pretty silly to get so attached
to a TV show, but a good one makes you care about the characters, or
at least makes you care what happens to them. There isn’t a group
of TV characters I’ve cared more about then those from The
Office. Despite some of their more outrageous antics, they
seemed like real people working in a real office. And despite those
outrageous moments—which were often hilarious—it was the subtle
glances, awkward pauses, and raised eyebrows that really made it all
so great. I’ll miss it.
