![]() ![]() 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 ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |