The way Michael Scott's return was unveiled, as a wedding gift from Jim, made for one of those moments.
Recognizing the value of an occasional "aww" was always one of the show's strengths, a realization that though the modern trend in comedy was towards irony, sarcasm, and meanness, there was still value and even laughs to be had in sweetness. It was pretty smart to have the panel address the significance of that innovation-as was giving the couple one last grand romantic gesture to elicit an "aww" from fans. Jess and Nick "shippers" who watch New Girl can thank the show for that. But The Office changed the rules in television once again by daring to explore what humor could result when a comedy's First Couple live genuinely in love with each other. Yes, the last year finally threw obstacles in their path, and watching them deal with them was the surprising highlight of the season. Not only that, it made them happy for seasons to come. Yet The Office didn't just make Jim and Pam a couple at the height of the series' popularity-seemingly prime time to drag out the romantic tension-it went further.
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The conventional wisdom has always been that getting a will-they/won't-they couple together too soon was a creative death sentence for a TV show. It's shrewd commentary on two characters whose arc, as boring and groan-worthy as it became, was pretty revolutionary for television. Pam even gets asked during the panel why she never realized she was living a fairy tale.
The panel attendees demand to know how a romance can be so perfect. We watched him grow from goofy everyman, to hopeless romantic, to dashing, ideal husband, even when Pam doesn't realize how good she's got it.
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The women attending the panel nearly all swoon over Jim, who over the course of the series was painted as an infallible Adonis. But it also allowed the show's writers to address audiences' grievances about what had unfolded throughout the course of the series, and especially in those last few, subpar seasons. The clever plot device enabled writers to fast forward to everyone's happy(ish) endings-Erin finds her birthmother (Joan Cusack!), Andy is finally a viral video star (on less than ideal terms), Dwight and Angela are getting married. The finale was framed by the wedding, but more important was a reunion panel to discuss the documentary about Dunder Mifflin that filmed over the previous nine years and finally aired on PBS.
Traditional, yes, but with unexpected genius. Can a sitcom's finale be more traditional than being a wedding episode? The discussion panel was a clever plot device that allowed the show's writers to address audiences' grievances, especially about those last few, subpar seasons. There were montages to remind us of how much characters have grown. Old favorites came back-hello, Mindy Kaling, BJ Novak, that stripper from the "Ben Franklin" episode, and, yes, even Steve Carell. Yet at the same time, it was a pleasingly traditional finale. A character fakes his death and no one much notices. There was a creepy scene in which Meredith reunited with, and then danced with, her stripper son. The episode opened with the harsh firings of two beloved characters. The Office finale, true to form, was the same. So The Office was always an unlikely concoction of weird and traditional elements. And in the middle of all this insanity, there was this achingly realistic Jim and Pam romance. The show's sitcom-y office hijinx came punctuated with instantly quotable one-liners. The people around him, too, made you care about them even as you laughed at them. But he was, as we want our heroes to be, easy to root for, and somehow worked as the lead. Michael Scott was the kind of character who is so unusual and buffoonish that he would typically be the second-tier supporting character. What The Office did so brilliantly in those early years was marry its odd new concept and tone with the standard expectations of a sitcom. Its documentary style was, at the time, untested.īut it had something big going for it: being really funny. It was this offbeat, sarcastic, unique thing starting up in the middle of an early-millennium crisis when some critics had declared sitcoms " dead." Steve Carell was an unproven lead. The single-camera comedy with a weird mockumentary format launched in a post- Friends, post- Everybody Loves Raymond time when comedies were still supposed to have laugh tracks, jokes were supposed to be understood by both young and old audiences, and new series were supposed to be led by stars. The Office never should've worked in the first place. The Office's Great, Fatal Insight: Monotony Can Be Funny
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