The Office (NBC) TV Show • Page 105

I’m sure they’re like “okay it’s the office but now with zoom meetings! and it’s a software startup instead of a paper company! Haha!”

 

The show had a pretty good first season. S2 and 3 are peak and the show at its best. 4-5 are mixed and gets worse as it goes. The humor pivoted towards being more broad and aimed towards a larger audience. S4 in particular was effected by the writers strike. The rest is barely worth watching, though the series finale was very heart warming and pretty dang good.

Prospects for a good reboot/requel are pretty dim.

 

Even the 3rd season started to go off the rails. I really didn't like what they did with Michael and Jan, and it felt like they wrote themselves into a corner with Karen and suddenly had to make her "bad" so Jim could end up with Pam.

 

I agree with all of this

 

Once Michael drove into the lake it was basically game over in terms of nuance.

 

That was season 4, right?

For me, the ultimate turning point for the show was Stress Relief. That cold open was insane and felt so weird given we saw how they reacted to a fire in season 2 already. Everybody became super exaggerated. Like, I get why they went with such a dumbed down broad cold open. It was after the Super Bowl and they wanted to show everyone how fun the show could be so more people would watch. I understand the choices they made during that time, but I think it made the show worse.

 

i do very much agree that everyone basically become a parody of themselves. always hated the way they wrote Kevin, and the ""joke"" of him being "that word i wont say" to haze Holly was maybe the worst thing they ever did.

Andy had a single season where he was tolerable and funny, as soon as he was a regular in S4 he was insufferable.

 

Yes. You can see the early threads of it when they drastically changed Kelly's character. It was much better when it was "normal" people dealing with a buffoon like Michael (and to some extent Dwight).

 

Yeah, season 4.

The "Stress Relief" cold open was abysmal.

 

2 is amazing, would not hesitate to call it the greatest sitcom season ever. 1 and 3 are also more awesome than not. Completely agree it's a different show from 4 on. Still funny, still occasionally heartwarming, but so dumbed down at the same time.

Pretty confident a reboot would be terrible, though I thought enough of the Clark Duke and Jake Lacy stuff was funny that I'm open to the idea Daniels could pull off a true reboot where it's just a completely new show with the same conceit of modern worklife but all new characters.

 

Angela is the best part about that Stress Relief cold open.

"I only weigh 82 pounds!" and when she throws Bandit up through the ceiling and he drops out the other side.

 

I think the Bandit stuff is terrible, sorry, Brad. Slapstick laugh track stuff.

 

I def get the criticism of the show's trajectory in general but for me season 5 was one of the funniest seasons if I remember correctly. Haven't watched it in order since it left netflix

 

As far as sitcoms go, the decline of this show is far more watchable than most I’ve seen (which is admittedly not many)

 

Season three has its moments but you could see where things were going, starting with that stupid Jerome Bettis cameo because he had signed onto NBC as a commentator. Once it became a major show for the network they had to be broad.

 

oh, Brad, noooo

 

I always stood pat on Seasons 2/3 being the best and they're still elite but I think 4 even in a shortened season is where everyone character wise at their best. 5/6 pretty mixed but Michael makes it tolerable. 7 you can tell they were running out of ideas and Carrell left for good reason. The plots in 8/9 are very cartoonish and every character became a caricature, the last few episodes of 9 save it.

 

Its great development from the original British version was its evolution into a show of the ensemble, and its great failing was its subsequent caricaturing of that ensemble.

Stress Relief's a good illustration actually. The first-aid scene is every character's microcosmic form lobbing in their joke, like different shades of faeces at a wall, and it's the most overpraised scene in the entire show; a live-action cartoon.

There were shades of that early; I always think the bit in Season 2 where Oscar wears Angela's baby poster for his photo ID jars strongly with the tone they had set up to then. I think it's a reflection of the way the show devolved that that sort of joke wouldn't have felt incongruous in later seasons.

 

S4’s worst decision was breaking up Dwight and Angela simply because with Jim and Pam together they needed relationship drama. You know, instead of a character reason or story idea. Nope, just needed drama.

 

Andy is really what starts bringing it down. His role in the show is already served by Dwight.

The end of season three would have been a perfect ending with Jim and Pam getting together and the constantly disrespected intern getting the job. American sitcoms almost never end on top though.

 

THANK YOU! I have been saying that since before the show ended haha

 

I actually think it was a good area to explore, had they not, yet again, turned it into a love triangle.

How many love triangles were written into the show? Jim/Pam/Roy, Dwight/Angela/Andy, Andy/Erin/Gabe, Ryan/Kelly/Darryl, Jan/Michael/Carol, Michael/Holly/AJ, Angela/The Senator/Oscar. I know I'm missing some. It was their default recourse if they wanted some drama.

 

Nah. Uninspired drama is boring and annoying as hell.

 

Steve Carrell actually wanted to stay! It was written about in that The Office tell all book written by Andy Greene a few years ago:

Author Andy Greene revealed that Carell actually didn't want to leave the series, but that NBC execs never communicated with the star about definitively renewing his contract. Hairstylist Kim Ferry said she witnessed Carell distraught over the network not working to keep him, even after he told them he wanted to stay after his original seven-season deal ended, and that it upset her to see that most people believed he chose to quit.

“He didn’t want to leave the show. He had told the network that he was going to sign for another couple of years. He was willing to and his agent was willing to. But for some reason, they didn’t contact him," Ferry insisted. "He planned on staying on the show. He told his manager and his manager contacted them and said he’s willing to sign another contract for a couple years. So all of that was willing and ready and, on their side, honest. And the deadline came for when they were supposed to give him an offer and it passed and they didn’t make him an offer." Ferry recalled Carell saying, "‘Look, I told them I want to do it. I don’t want to leave. I don’t understand.’"

Boom mic operator Brian Wittie recalled the network and Carell's lack of communication over his impending exit.

“I sat with him one time and he told me the story: He was doing a radio interview and he haphazardly mentioned, almost unconsciously, that it might be his last season. He didn’t plan on saying it out loud and he hadn’t decided anything. He was kind of thinking out loud, but he did it in an interview in public and it created news," Wittie said. "Then what he said was, the people connected to the show had no reaction to it. They didn’t call and say, ‘What? You wanna leave?’ He said he didn’t get any kind of response from them. When he realized he didn’t get any kind of response from them, he thought, ‘Oh, maybe they don’t really care if I leave. Maybe I should go do other things.’”

One possible explanation for their silence: Greene points out in the book that Carell's exit came as NBC had some major shakeups near the top. Bob Greenblatt was replacing Jeff Zucker, and The Office producer Randy Cordray alleged that Greenblatt "was not as big a fan of The Office as we wished he would’ve been."

 

This is gonna be like that abysmal ninth episode of Scrubs, isn't it? That was one of the most miserable pseudo spin-offs I've ever seen.