The Decline of The Office

 

It’s always easier to analyze things in retrospect, and the demise of The Office, my one-time favorite show on television, is no different. In retrospect it’s easy to point to the third season premiere as the moment when things went south, but at the time I didn’t feel that way at all.

First, though, I should acknowledge that I’m in the minority. Most people probably object to the very premise of my account of the “the decline of The Office,” since the show has increased in popularity and prestige since I stopped watching. The Office is a perennial Emmy nominee and is still considered one of the best and smartest shows on television.

And there was a time when I would have been the show’s most vocal defender. During seasons one and two, I preached the virtues of the show to anyone who would listen. My friends and I (Tim and Josh included) counted down to episodes of the show and made references to it in daily conversations. We were particularly eager for the premiere of season three, “Gay Witch Hunt.”

As I said, that episode was a turning point for the show, though I didn’t realize it at the time. The episode—which featured Michael outing Oscar to the office and then, in an attempt to redeem himself, kissing him—struck me as a little outlandish, but nothing out of character for the show. After the episode aired, my sister Elizabeth called me to complain about it. It was three years ago, but my memory tells me that the conversation went something like this:

—Elizabeth: “John, I’m worried.”

—John: “Why?”

—Elizabeth: “They won the Emmy and now they’re trying to appeal to some broad audience.”

—John: “What are you talking about?”

—Elizabeth: “Michael and Oscar kissed! That’s not subtle or clever. That’s just unrealistic.”

—John: “Oh chill out. It’s not that unrealistic. Don’t be so conspiratorial. It’s just one episode.”

Of course, I was wrong and Elizabeth was right; it was ridiculous and unrealistic, and it wasn’t just one episode. From that point on, The Office stopped being a clever, subtle, look at realistic characters, and started turning into a farce. It also stopped being funny.

What originally made The Office so great was how it generated humor from the mundane. This is not to say that it never veered into absurd territory, but the characters, their motivations, and, most important, the humor, always seemed real.

Take, for example, the episode “Dwight’s Speech” from the second season. This episode was a brilliant blend of the ridiculous and the commonplace, beginning with its opening. In this scene, Michael and Dwight toss a football around while discussing some office predicament, but they are tossing the ball around in the most obnoxious, distracting way possible. The resonance of this scene is obvious: Michael is more concerned with projecting a “care-free, fun-loving” vibe than with actually getting anything done and Dwight is happy to do anything Michael wants, no matter how counterproductive it is. Even the filler dialogue thrown in works in this scene, indicating that what’s being discussed is secondary to how it is being discussed.

Eventually the scene becomes borderline absurd, with Dwight actually tackling Ryan to “force a fumble” and stiff-arming two other co-workers. What makes this scene work, however, is that, while the outcome seems silly, at no point do any of the characters’ actions seem unjustified or inconsistent with their personalities: Michael is throwing the ball because he’s so preoccupied with his “cool boss” image, Dwight is obsessed with doing whatever he thinks will please Michael because he has a fetish for authority, Jim and the rest of the office play keep-away from Michael because their only way of rebelling against the “cool boss” is to stretch his tolerance to the breaking point, and Ryan doesn’t do anything because he’d rather be anywhere else at all.*

*The show was even brilliant enough that, when the chaos settles down and Michael gets Dwight to stop, Michael doesn’t punish anyone or get mad or even stop throwing the ball; the only thing he does is ask Ryan if he’s ok—despite the fact that two other employees are ALSO on the ground—because Michael is concerned with seeming hip to the youngest, and coolest, employee in the office, before he resumes throwing the ball around. 

This is the kind of writing I liked about the show, the kind that could use something as banal and innocuous as a game of catch to point out the humor in an entire cast of characters.

In the third season, however, the characters stopped being rich, realistic portraits and started acting like cartoon characters who would do whatever outlandish thing seemed like it would get a laugh. The show stopped mining the mundane for humor and started inserting things that might seem humorous into mundane scenarios; the result was forced, bad writing.

The Michael/Oscar kiss is a fine example (no boss, no matter how much he wanted to be liked and how oblivious he was, would ever kiss an employee on the lips against his will in front of the entire office and expect not only to not get fired for it, but to actually be praised for it), but there are plenty of others. The breaking point for me came in the episode, “Ben Franklin.” In this episode, a Ben Franklin impersonator comes to the office for some reason I can’t remember, and Jim tries to convince Dwight that he is the actual Ben Franklin. In an attempt to prove him wrong, Dwight tries to ask the impersonator a number of obscure facts about Franklin in the hopes of tripping him up. In other words, Dwight actually considers the possibility that this is the real Ben Franklin. We’d been led to believe a lot of things about Dwight up until that point—that he was authoritarian, pompous, unsympathetic, loyal, straight-laced, etc.—but never that he was functionally retarded.

This was the worst part about watching The Office as it declined: It didn’t just get bad, it got insulting: Do you really expect me to believe that Dwight isn’t familiar with the phenomenon of impersonators? That he thinks Benjamin Franklin is possibly immortal?

The show still does this. In last week’s season premiere, Michael talks about how you have to keep people guessing:

It’s like the end of ‘Spartacus.’ I have seen that movie half a dozen times, and I still don’t know who the real Spartacus is. And that is what makes that movie a classic whodunit.

 The “joke” here (and it should be noted that this joke was actually highlighted in multiple reviews as a “good joke”) is that Michael is so stupid that he radically misinterpreted the final scene, and overall meaning, of Spartacus, despite seeing it “half a dozen times.”

Now, I’ve never seen Spartacus. I don’t know who directed it, who stars in it, and I couldn’t tell you much about the plot of the film. But I DO know that it’s not “a classic whodunit.” How do I know this? BECAUSE I’M A FUCKING HUMAN BEING WHO LIVES ON PLANET EARTH! ANYONE WHO HAS ANY FAMILIARITY AT ALL WITH THE FILM SPARTACUS KNOWS IT’S NOT A GODDAMN “WHODUNIT.” And what do the writers expect us to believe, that Michael watched the film half a dozen times by himself? And never had a single conversation of even the most superficial depth about the movie with anyone, despite the fact that he’s clearly been portrayed (for five seasons!) as someone who talks to his employees about everything? That he never even once felt the strange urge to, I don’t know, Wikipedia the film? Or even look at the side of the DVD where it lists the goddamn genre? How fucking stupid do the writers think we are?

OK, sorry, I got a little worked up there. I realize that some people might claim that I’m “overthinking” the joke, but good comedy should be able to stand up to the most rudimentary mental analysis.

And this is why I had to stop watching the show: It was asking me to accept things that didn’t make any sense at all within the context of the show for the sake of simple, broad, uninspiring jokes.

There are a lot of minor, contributing reasons to why The Office got unwatchable—the show tried to put every character into a relationship or love triangle, the plots got formulaic and predictable, the character of Michael became unbelievable and cartoonish, the jokes became repetitive*—but they are all really subsets of this larger theme: The show became unrealistic. The characters became unrealistically stupid or unrealistically tolerant of stupid behavior. The situations were outlandish. Basically, the world of The Office stopped resembling anything recognizable as the actual world.

*Here’s another annoying thing about The Office that doesn’t really have anything to do with why the show got bad: the whole “That’s what she said” phenomenon. Within the context of the show, the joke was an insensitive, unclever pun used to illustrate how funny Michael thought he was, and how unfunny he actually was. In other words, the whole point of the line was that it WASN’T FUNNY. But this somehow inspired people to start saying “That’s what she said” sarcastically to the point of annoyance, or even sometimes unironically. People started intentionally saying an unfunny thing to seem funny. This wasn’t really The Office’s fault, but it was still irritating enough to make me feel good about disassociating myself from the show.

Now, it’s not as if all comedy has to be realistic and reasonable. The fact is, every fictional narrative is, to some degree, “unreal.” The problem was that The Office kept changing it’s own internal reality.

Look, for example, at Arrested Development (the thinking man’s The Office). That show makes The Office look like an Emile Zola novel (both in how realistic it is and how funny it is): One character gets his hand bit off by a seal, another tries to join the Blue Man Group, another escapes from prison by shaving his twin brother’s head, another gets a job a movie studio before she turns 16. Very little about the show qualifies as “realistic,” and yet it’s one of the funniest television shows of all time. The reason for this is that Arrested Development establishes its own exaggerated, absurd reality from the beginning, and never asks the audience to alter that reality for the sake of a cheap joke.

In the very first episode of Arrested Development, for example, the main character, Michael, refuses to run the family business, so his mother puts his brother Buster in charge, because Buster’s taken business classes: “Well, 18^th century agrarian business… but I guess it’s all the same principles. Let me ask you, are you at all concerned about an uprising?”

This may seem “unrealistically stupid,” but it’s not: Buster is defined from the outset as absurdly sheltered and naïve and overeducated, so it’s not unrealistic, within the context of the show, for him to think a modern housing developer might be “concerned about an uprising.” It’s also not mere stupidity that is funny about this line; it’s the misapplication of refined knowledge and, implicitly, the gap the between academics and reality that is funny.

Conversely, the only thing funny about so many of the post-“Gay Witch Hunt” episodes of The Office is just that Michael Scott or Dwight Schrute (or someone else perhaps) has done something unbelievably stupid or outlandish. Whereas Dwight tackled Ryan because he wanted to please Michael, and Michael tolerates it because he doesn’t ever want to seem like an “authority,” the only character traits mocked in the Spartacus/kissing Oscar/questioning Franklin jokes are that the characters are stupid or oblivious. The characters become no different from Joey Tribbiani.

What’s so frustrating is that The Office used to be so good at nuanced and clever writing. In the first season episode, “The Alliance,” for example, Michael gives his views on charity:

When I retire, I don’t want to just move to some island somewhere. I want to be the guy who gives it all back. I want it to be like, ‘Hey… who donated that hospital wing that’s saving so many lives?’ ‘I don’t know. It was anonymous.’ ‘Well, guess what. It was Michael Scott.’ ‘But how do you know? It says anonymous.’ [pause] ‘Because I’m him.’ 

This is a joke about Michael saying something dumb. But it’s also a joke about Michael being a whore for glory, about him being unable to think through his own hypothetical scenario, and, most of all, about the image of Michael camping out in front of his own hospital wing to tell strangers that he donated it. The humor in this joke comes from contradictions and self-aggrandizement of Michael’s personality, traits that are very common and recognizable. 

Starting in season three, the show stopped forging comedy from these revealing, small moments in mundane situations. Instead, they opted for broad jokes that stretched the imagination and offended the intellect. The writers are the same, the actors are the same, and the characters’ names are the same, but the jokes, and the show, are much different.