Are you watching The Office? If you’ve ever worked in a cubicle farm, you should be. The antics of Michael Scott and the gang at Dunder Mifflin Scranton are head and shoulders above the rest of the sitcoms on TV today. The bread and butter of the show is in its ability to make the most of an awkward situation.
Almost every week there is a moment in the show that brings the viewer an almost guilty, voyeuristic feeling, as if you are watching something that you just aren’t meant to see but you don’t know how to back out of it gracefully. The sublimely inept Michael, played by Steve Carell, repeatedly finds himself embroiled in bad situations of his own making that are at once bizarre and somehow familiar.
The entire staff of the Dunder Mifflin office also feels familiar, although exaggerated to extremes. From the office cool guy (Jim, played by John Krazinski) to the office stick in the mud (Angela dryly acted by Angela Kinsey) to the office pain in the butt (Dwight, who is portrayed by Rainn Wilson), The Office takes character traits and personalities from real life and then cranks them up to eleven.
The show has progressed from a knock-off of the original, British version of the show to a Dilberesque parody of office life to something else altogether. Having mined the office life pretty deeply, the show has turned to focus more on the absurdly idiotic boss of the branch office, Michael. The show succeeds where others of the like have failed by taking steps to flesh out the characters. Instead of being a one-dimensional parody of a bad boss, Michael is the embodiment of the Peter Principle, which states that good workers are promoted to their point of incompetence. In Michael’s case, he was a great salesman and is rewarded by being promoted into management, where he languishes in his own ineptitude.
NBC has somehow maintained a stranglehold on Thursday night comedies for decades. The Office, which is on at 9 PM ET every Thursday, is a worthy flag bearer for that tradition.
