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Back when the drama started that eventually led to the end of my nine-year relationship with Ellie Darling, it seemed imperative to me that I spend more time with her, and she suggested that watching the American version of The Office would be a good way to do that. She’d been lobbying for us to watch it together for ages, but I had always been resistant, because many years earlier, my previous girlfriend had proposed that we watch the British version, and I found the first episode such an ordeal that I was disinclined to subject myself to any further episodes of either show. But under the circumstances, I was up for anything, and we actually got through all 191 episodes before Ellie moved away.
Robert Reed was famously written out of the final episode of The Brady Bunch after sending producer Sherwood Schwartz a memo protesting the stupidity of the script. Reed declared:
There is a fundamental difference in theatre between:
1. Melodrama
2. Drama
3. Comedy
4. Farce
5. Slapstick
6. Satire &
7. Fantasy
They require not only a difference in terms of construction, but also in presentation and, most explicitly, styles of acting. Their dramatis personae are noninterchangable. […] Andy Hardy could not appear in a Laurel and Hardy film. Andy Hardy is a “comedic” character, Laurel and Hardy are of the purest slapstick. The boundaries are rigid, and within the confines of one theatric piece the style must remain constant.
Why? It is a long since proven theorem in the theatre that an audience will adjust its suspension of belief to the degree that the opening of the presentation leads them. When a curtain rises on two French maids in a farce set discussing the peccadilloes of their master, the audience is now set for an evening of theatre in a certain style, and are prepared to accept having excluded certain levels of reality. And that is the prime difference in the styles of theatre, both for the actor and the writer—the degree of reality inherent. Pure drama and comedy are closest to core realism, slapstick and fantasy the farthest removed. […]
Television falls under exactly the same principle. What the networks in their oversimplification call “sitcoms” actually are quite diverse styles except where bastardized by careless writing or performing. […] And all of the actors in the same piece must deal with the same level [of reality], or the audience will not know to whom to adjust and will often empathize with the character with the most credibility—total reality eliciting the most complete empathic response. Example: We are in the operating room in M*A*S*H, with the usual pan shot across a myriad of operating tables filled with surgical teams at work. The leads are sweating away at their work, and at the same time engaged in banter with the head nurse. Suddenly, the doors fly open and Batman appears! Now the scene cannot go on. The M*A*S*H characters, dealing with their own level of quasi-comic reality […] cannot accept as real in their own terms this other character. Oh yes, they could make fast adjustments. He is a deranged member of some battle-fatigued platoon and somehow came upon a Batman suit. But the Batman character cannot then play his intended character true to his own series. Even if it were possible to mix both styles, it would have to be dealt with by the characters, not just abruptly accepted. Meanwhile, the audience will stick with that level of reality to which they have been introduced, and unless the added character quickly adjusts, will reject him.
What most struck me about The Office is that its core idea is a rejection of Reed’s dogma. It unapologetically presents incompatible genres of comedy interwoven with each other. On the one hand, you’ve got a realistic romantic comedy in which Jim, a laid-back paper salesman at Dunder Mifflin in hardscrabble Scranton, Pennsylvania, spends his workdays exchanging banter with Pam, the charming sweetheart who serves as the branch receptionist. There’s amusing repartee, but also astute observation of the way friendliness shades into illicit flirting—illicit because Pam is already engaged to someone else—and of the reality of the lives most of us have to settle for. Jim wants to work in sports marketing, and Pam wants to be an artist, but I suspect that more than a few viewers could relate to the experience of taking a random job to pay the rent in the meantime, only to discover one day that, whoops, you’ve been working there for ten years.
Then you’ve got a silly farce about a ridiculous cartoon of a man who, for example, explains a foot injury as follows: “Most nights before I go to bed, I will lay six strips of bacon out on my George Foreman grill. Then I go to sleep. When I wake up, I plug in the grill. I go back to sleep again. Then I wake up to the smell of crackling bacon. It is delicious, it’s good for me, it’s a perfect way to start the day. Today I got up, I stepped onto the grill, and it clamped down on my foot. That’s it. I don’t see what’s so hard to believe about that.” This is Michael Scott, the manager of the Scranton branch, whose response to complaints that the office is worse than prison is to put on a bandana and pretend to be a guest speaker, “Prison Mike”, here to do a riff on the Scared Straight! specials, except he quickly runs out of material. When asked what the worst part of prison was, he replies, “The worst part of prison was the… was the dementors, they… were flyin’ all over the place and they were scary and then they’d come down and they’d suck the soul outta your body and it HOIT!” This is a very different kind of comedy, based not on chuckles of recognition but on wacky deviations from recognizable behavior.
Bridging the gap to a certain extent is the show’s big breakout character, Dwight Schrute, a sort of pudgy, middle-aged, quasi-Amish version of Napoleon Dynamite with authoritarian leanings. He is weird enough not to wind up as just a straight man in scenes with Michael Scott, yet he doesn’t come off as a completely incongruous presence in his scenes with Jim and Pam. He actually makes for a good foil for Jim, as the intense co-worker who takes paper sales extremely seriously and craves a promotion to middle management, while Jim coasts through the job; pulling pranks on Dwight also gives Jim and Pam something to bond over. There are other characters who get substantial amounts of screen time beyond these four; one thing I liked about the show is that at any given time there are fifteen to twenty regular cast members, so the show doesn’t feel as claustrophobic as shows that follow the same four or six people year after year. The problem is that most of them are products of Pattern 45: the central joke behind Dwight, and Creed, and Ryan, and Angela, and Meredith, and Kevin, and Kelly, and Jan, and Roy, and Andy and Stanley and Phyllis to a slightly lesser extent, and Todd Packer to a much greater extent, is “ha, ha, aren’t these people awful?”. Most damningly, this is also true for Michael Scott, and ultimately, while Jim and Pam are the heart of the show, Michael is its main character. So the fact that he’s perhaps American television’s best known example of cringe comedy is a problem for those of us who don’t find cringing to be fun.
That is one of the main reasons (apart from my usual Pattern 23 alienation) that I was so turned off by the pilot for the British version of The Office: David Brent, on whom Michael Scott is based, is perhaps British television’s best known example of cringe comedy. Brent says, “I’ve created an atmosphere where I’m a friend first and a boss second—probably an entertainer third,” and the show is a portrait of a man who desperately wants to be not only the center of attention at all times, not only respected as a beneficient authority figure, but also beloved as a jokester. The problem is that his jokes are generally based on a sort of teasing bonhomie that almost invariably falls flat. In the first scene of the series, he calls up the warehouse director: “Sammy, you old slag! How is Elaine? She left you yet?” Pained look. He hangs up. “She has left him. I forgot about that.” In the next scene, he heads over to the receptionist’s desk; in this version, the receptionist is named Dawn, and Brent jokes, “I’d say, uh, at one time or another, every bloke in the office has woken up at the crack of Dawn!” But instead of a blush and a giggle, he gets an outraged “What?!” from Dawn. Then, awkward silence. Oh, the hilarity!
While Ellie was away for a few days, I did decide to revisit the British version of The Office and watch the whole thing this time. I’d heard that it was very different, based on the notion that, (a) British viewers had more tolerance for unlikeable characters, and (b) since the show only ran for a grand total of twelve episodes plus a Christmas special, there was less concern that David Brent would wear out his welcome. In fact, on the British version of the show, he does wear out his welcome diegetically, and is fired in episode eleven. By contrast, the usual line goes, the American producers sanded the most obnoxious elements off Michael Scott between seasons one and two so that he would be more palatable over the long term. I actually found that, apart from a distinctly coarser tone that has less to do with writing choices than with British culture in general, the British show resembled its American spinoff a lot more closely than I had anticipated. While the American Office did include a lot more characters than the British version, it is very clear that Michael, Dwight, Jim, Pam, Ryan, Todd Packer, Jan, Roy, and Kevin are not just loosely inspired by but directly drawn from David, Gareth, Tim, Dawn, Jamie, Chris Finch, Jennifer, Lee, and Keith in the British show. And to whatever extent the American producers did try to redeem Michael Scott, we see at least the initial moves toward a similar face turn for David Brent in the British version’s Christmas special. |
But I don’t know that I’m convinced that Michael Scott is necessarily all that much easier to take in seasons two through seven of the American Office. Yes, he is given some redeeming moments, such as when he shows up at Pam’s art show and is the only one who likes her work. But that doesn’t begin to balance out all the moments when he is just the worst. Poke around on the internets and you will find plenty of lists of Michael Scott’s lowlights, like when he tries to make Phyllis’s wedding all about himself, or when he forces Dwight to take the blame for one of Michael’s failed ideas and then demands the credit when it turns out to be an unexpected success, or when he promises to put a group of underprivileged kids through college and then reneges. I was going to say something like, “Still, the real problem with Michael Scott is that he is constantly forcing the office staff to sit through his unfunny comedy routines,” and started clicking through episodes to pull up a couple of random scenes as examples, but here is what actually came up:
Michael is in the warehouse horsing around on a forklift. Darryl, the warehouse manager, tells him, “Mike, get off of the lift, please!”, but Michael says, “I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine,” right before slamming the forklift into a gigantic shelving unit of supplies, which falls over and takes another one down like a couple of dominoes. “We’ll get somebody to clean that up,” Michael says hurriedly, to which Darryl snarls, “We’re the ones that gotta clean that up!” “Damn it, Michael!” wails another warehouse worker. “We have to have this thing serviced,” Michael mutters.
Michael wants a new partner and has decided that the office staff has to help him find one. Phyllis volunteers that she has a friend who’s single, but Phyllis is overweight, so Michael is suspicious. “Could we share a rowboat?” he asks. “Could, could a rowboat support her?”
Phyllis: “What are you asking?”
Michael: “I think I’m being very clear what I’m asking. Would an average sized rowboat support her without capsizing?” An awkward silence. “It bothers me that you’re not answering the question.”
Phyllis, downcast: “No, all right? No, she can’t fit in a rowboat.”
Michael: “Damn it! I knew it. I knew it, Phyllis.”
A short time later, Michael has a directive: “I am a catch, and I am not going to be the one who got away. So, this is what we’re going to do. Dwight is going to hand out index cards, and I want you all to write down the name of an eligible woman for me to date by the end of the day. No, by the end of the hour, or… you are fired.”
And again, these are not scenes I remembered in which Michael is particularly awful, but just scenes I randomly clicked on. I did eventually find a typical comedy bit: the Dunder Mifflin branch in Stamford, Connecticut, has folded, and the Scranton office is taking on its employees, one of whom—Karen, one of the few characters on the show who is not awful—happens to be biracial. “Welcome welcome welcome!” Michael declares, interrupting a conversation between Karen and Pam, before making silly faces and jerky movements while saying in a mechanical voice, “Take - me - to - your - leader—oh - wait - I - am - your - leader.” “Wait, ah, are you a robot or a… Martian?” Karen asks. Michael freezes up, then presses onward: “I am actually your boss, Michael Scott—welcome! Wow, you’re very exotic looking. Was your dad a G.I., or…?” Awkward silence as Karen’s face falls. So, yeah—I am not in Robert Reed’s camp, but I did behave as Reed describes and watched the show for its realistic side, not because I dislike genre blending, but because Michael Scott is the worst. Well, no, Todd Packer is the worst. But the others aren’t much better, and on the rare occasions that a character was introduced who wasn’t loathsome (e.g., Erin), it felt like a reprieve. Of course, there’s always the exception that proves the rule, and I have to say, even though he was one of the worst characters of all, I totally loved Creed. The writers found this sweet spot between clueless and sinister that I found reliably hilarious. When I was clicking around looking for random scenes, I happened across this bit with Creed: “When Pam gets Michael’s old chair, I get Pam’s old chair. Then I’ll have… two chairs.” Fixing the camera with a Kubrick stare: “Only one to go.”
One last thought: if I had written about this show when it aired, I would probably be wondering about the very premise of the Michael Scott and David Brent characters. What are they even a commentary on?, I would have asked. Who out there worms his way into a position of power and then tries to leverage that power to try to force people to think he’s funny? Is that actually a thing? Then we all met Elon.
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This is the last thing Ellie and I watched together before she moved away. Like, we watched this series finale the night of March 19, and then the morning of March 20 was the finale of our own nine-year run. I wrote about the first two seasons back in 2018, so here is one quick thought on each of the subsequent three seasons:
Stranger Things 3: This was the mall season, and as someone who spent a big chunk of the 1980s in malls, gadzooks, did they ever nail what a 1980s mall was like. I just wish I’d had the foresight to bring our camcorder on one of those mall trips, because even though the internets have proven to have eventually coughed up almost every piece of information I’ve ever sought, one thing I haven’t been able to find is footage of the malls I used to frequent—I really wish I could find some video or even just photos taken in the Mall of Orange in particular, since it’s gone now. I mean, I’ve seen things in malls you Millennials and Zoomers wouldn’t believe. Computer game shops with shelves full of gray Infocom boxes. Pet stores where unfortunate puppies and kittens churned out by animal mills were handled by random children for twelve hours a day. I watched cigarette butts glitter in the thin haze of smoke that hung over everything. All those moments will be lost in time, like corn dogs disappearing into a vat of cottonseed oil at the food court.
Stranger Things 4: This was the season in which the producers decided that having some sort of spider monster as the big bad was too impersonal and introduced Vecna as a human or at least human-ish villain. This was also the season that sent “Running Up That Hill”, a Kate Bush synth-pop song from 1985, to the top of the charts in eight countries and to #3 in the U.S. in 2022, a fair bit better than its #30 peak when originally released. It might seem strange for the show to posit a Kate Bush track as the favorite song of an American kid in 1986, but in fact my colleagues on my high school newspaper were constantly writing about musical acts from the other side of the Atlantic who were obscure in the U.S.: I remember them writing articles on the likes of the Damned, Billy Bragg, and Sinéad O’Connor (years before “Nothing Compares 2 U”), and yes, they did play Kate Bush on the boom box in the journalism room. How they heard about this music was a mystery to me, but I guess that’s what I get for listening to KLSX in high school instead of KROQ.
Stranger Things 5: And then this season pulled off one of my favorite narrative tricks: bringing a previously obscure supporting character right into the middle of things. I don’t know whether boosting Holly Wheeler from age three in 1983 to age ten in 1987 was meant as a tribute to 1980s sitcoms that had babies turn into kindergarteners over the course of a single summer—a practice that was explicitly commented upon in WandaVision—or whether it was just a necessity to make the season work (and since nine years passed in real life while four years passed on the show, in a way they aged her down). In any case, to watch Holly graduate from an afterthought to the central heroine of the show was wonderful.
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