• “Yeah, I’m trying to lure these kids into my booth. But kids are very wary of being lured these days. Thank you, Dateline.”
• “All of these jobs suck. I would rather live jobless, on a beach somewhere, off the money from a large inheritance… than to have to work in any one of this crapholes.”
• “Justin is the ugly girl in the movie, who takes off her glasses… and she’s hot! And you realize that she was always hot. She was just wearing glasses. And that you were the blind one.”
• “Today, I did something stupid. I questioned myself. And I’ll never do that again.”

Related posts:

1. Weekly The Office Discussion- The Deposition
2. Weekly The Office Discussion- Survivorman
3. Weekly The Office- Night Out

Best lines from last night’s episode of The Office:

“Why Am I being forced to come in tomorrow and pretend a website made sales that I made?”

“It’s not the horniness, it’s the loneliness.”

“If I’m dead, you guys have been dead for weeks.”

“I’m a Bank Teller. Ryan told me to always tell women you work in finance.”

“I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but I think I want her to meet my mom.”

Related posts:

1. Weekly The Office- Dinner Party
2. Weekly The Office – Job Fair
3. Weekly The Office Discussion- Survivorman

Regular readers of this blog will remember that before the writer’s strike, I did a weekly rundown of episodes of NBC’s The Office.

You can imagine my delight when I rang up my TIVO last night and saw that The Office was back.

The Dinner Party was The Office’s version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Jan and Michael of course in the George and Martha roles.

I think this was one of the best episodes they’ve ever done… which it should have been after such a hiatus.

I was hoping for more of Andy and Angela, but I guess we’ll get that later this season.

One of the things that has made the American version of The Office excel has been its focus on the absurdity of our work-mates, not just our workplace.

I suppose you could read something into the difference between Brits and Americans in this… The British version of The Office was about the plight of normal people trying to exist under the thumb of an authoritarian dumbass. It’s a comedy very much much born from a tradition of monarchy and a class system. David Brent was a Twit… maybe not an Upper Class Twit, but a twit none the less.

Michael Scott, in contrast, is a character that could only be born from an egalitarian society… a LAZY and CLUELESS egalitarian society. David Brent rose to his position on the strength of his preening and pomposity. Michael Scott got where he is because no one was paying attention, or had the guts to enact some quality control.

What makes the American version of The Office so great is that it taps into the sense that work throws us all into an environment that forces us to interact with a bunch of losers, psychos and miscreants that we would never dream of knowing otherwise.

The stupidity of the boss is beside the point. The stupidity of the boss is taken for granted. The stupidity of the guy in the next cubicle over is what breaks your soul down on a daily basis.

The British version never got to an episode as nuanced as the Dinner Party. Of course, they never got a chance to.

I also love the subtle details.

For instance, the Scott condo. The black-framed picture frames from Target. The aspirational purchase of a 10 inch plasma tv.

I remember when I first saw Office Space, thinking: the apartment complex those guys lived in is EXACTLY the sort of apartment complex my entire generation has lived in at one time or another in our 20s.

It’s the same with the Scott condo. Probably a townhouse condo. Sold as a step up from a single floor condo, sold for around $200k until recently… but still a step down from, and a hopeful stepping stone to, a McMansion. How many people of a certain age are living in just such a condo as they watch the episode?

Kudos to the Office. And welcome back.

Related posts:

1. Weekly The Office Discussion- A Bad Day For Big Tuna
2. Weekly The Office Discussion- Survivorman
3. Weekly The Office Discussion- The Deposition

There’s good news and bad news about this episode.

First, the bad news. Since the WGA strike shows no signs of abating any time soon, this might be the last time we get to see our friends from The Office for a while. Apparently, this show did not get enough episodes “in the can” before the strike began. The S is really beginning to hit the fan here, people. What will I have left to TIVO? Might I be reduced to restarting my NetFlix subscription? They don’t make good movies anymore! TV is all I’ve got!

But the good news is that even if this is the last episode we get for the foreseeable future, it’s a great one!

This episode had bits and pieces of almost everything we love about the show. Kelly at her wacky best. Dwight at his idiot savant best. Some great Michael-isms. Oh, and perhaps the pinnacle of the Michael/Toby feud.

I didn’t hold much hope for Micheal testifying in Jan’s lawsuit against Dunder Mifflin. I can usually only take Jan in small doses, and the thought of having an entire episode revolve around her left me cold. But right away, I could see the writer’s had something special up their sleeves.

I believe Michael went into the deposition completely on board with Jan’s plan for victory. Michael’s attempts to give line readings as testimony backfired as hilariously as you would expect. But slowly it becomes apparent that the Dunder Mifflin legal team has done it’s homework and Michael is completely unable to improvise.

It becomes clear that the deposition will represent, in a way, Michael’s greatest ever crisis of faith. Who should he betray? “M’lady” or Dunder Mifflin? For Michael, whose’ perverse but fanatical personal code of loyalty is often his best and worst feature simultaneously, the question could not pierce deeper. In his own heart, he’s not even capable of betrayal. But he’s going to have to make a choice. Is he a good employee or a good boyfriend? Which is more noble

But by the end of the episode, the great truth that Michael has always been blind to is been made obvious even to him: no one respects him. His boobery and incompetence are only foils that the people around him suffer through or use to their advantage. And so he ends up cleaving to Dunder Mifflin, if only because he never expected Jan to be so devious. As he puts it, in the Line of the Episode: “You expect to get screwed by your company. You never expect to get screwed by your girlfriend.”

A bonus summary of Kelly’s “smack”

• “You’re ugly and I know it for a fact cause I’ve got the evidence right here.”
• “What has two skinny chicken legs and sucks at ping pong?”
• “Jim couldn’t hit a ping-pong ball if it was the size of the moon.”
• “Were Jim’s parents first cousins that were also bad at ping pong?”
• “The floppy haired girl you date won a point.”

Related posts:

1. Weekly The Office Discussion- Survivorman
2. Weekly The Office Discussion- A Bad Day For Big Tuna
3. Weekly The Office- Dinner Party

This is our weekly wrap-up and discussion of NBC’s The Office. This is your spoiler alert. If you haven’t watched the episode yet, then stop right here.
If you’ve already seen the episode and want to add your two cents, then click right through and join us!

As you noticed if you watched any of the other NBC comedies last night, it was NBC’s Green Week. Yes, it was an absurd corporate synergy gimmick that the meta-30 Rock was able to skewer even while conforming (who knew Al Gore could act?).

So, like the other shows, the Office had to crowbar in some sort of story that conformed with the “green” theme. In our case, Ryan has a “getting to know you” camping weekend to which he invites several of the middle managers from across the Dunder Mifflin universe- including Toby. Michael… is not invited.

So, Michael decides to be Survivorman. Why? I dunno. Outfitted with nothing but a knife (supplied from a hidden office arsenal) and a roll of duct tape, Dwight blindfolds him and takes him out to the wilderness for some… survivaling. Of course, Dwight (the Overkill Killer) is a bit of a Survivorman himself, and so he sticks around to make sure Michael survives his ordeal. What we get are a few predictable riffs on Michael’s ineptitude/underestimation of his own nature skills. In the end, Dwight saves Michael from ingesting poisonous mushrooms and the adventure is over.

This subplot felt exactly like what it was: a tacked-on, unnecessary and illogical subplot. The real fun and the real action was back in the office where Jim was in charge. I don’t know about you, but didn’t you always get the sense that, as great a guy as Jim is, he’d likely be a miserable failure as a boss? Well, Jim proves this by making a “rookie” mistake when he decrees that instead of celebrating everyone’s birthday individually, birthdays will now be rolled into one communal bash.

The natives predictably rebel against this, and Jim finds that managing everyone’s petty jealousies and bickering is more than he bargained for. The office denizens, for their part, feel that the power has gone to Jim’s head. And Jim begins to display Michael-esque leadership tendencies. He even begins to dislike Toby.

In the end, Michael returns to save Jim who is shaken by the realization that there’s a little bit of Michael in all of us.

I think this was an uneven episode. The Survivorman subplot was so needless and ill-fitting… but it was paired with one of the more enjoyable subplots about the office’s delicate social order.

Quote of the week: “It’s better to be hurt by someone you know- accidentally- than by a stranger on purpose.”

Discuss…

Related posts:

1. Weekly The Office Discussion- A Bad Day For Big Tuna
2. Weekly The Office Discussion- The Deposition
3. Weekly The Office- Dinner Party

Still posting fun stuff from the strike. This video’s pretty cool, though. Not only do you get to see a ton of your favorite people from NBC’s The Office (a lot of their “writers” are also “actors” on the show) but they do a good job of explaining why they’re striking in the first place.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6hqP0c0_gw]

Related posts:

1. WGA Strike- Fun To Watch
2. The Writers Guild Strike- Not the Daily Show
3. What People Are Forwarding Us This Week- Teutonic Speed Bumps

This is our weekly wrap-up and discussion of NBC’s The Office. This is your spoiler alert. If you haven’t watched the episode yet, then stop right here.

If you’ve already seen the episode and want to add your two cents, then click right through and join us!

Well, Karen is back! I was wondering if we had seen the last of her. It turns out she is managing the Utica branch. In the brief scenes we get of Utica, it’s clear she’s managing this branch in the professional, efficient, non-Michael Scott way you’d expect.

When Karen tried to poach Stanley to come work for her, Michael is so distraught at the thought of losing his “sassy” underling that he declares war. After pleading doesn’t work, Stanley’s efforts to be bought off are rebuffed and Michael’s attempts to reverse-poach from Karen are a failure, more stringent methods are called for. Jim is essentially kidnapped by Michael and Dwight who bring him along on a “pantie raid” to… do what?… I guess just humiliate the Utica branch. This of course ends in hilarity and Jim is brought face to face with Karen, who is, to say the least, not quite “over” things.

I haven’t agreed with the general criticism that this year’s The Office was too much on the wacky and not much on the funny. I think this is the best the show has ever been, so far. But I can concede that the return to 1/2 hour episodes is a plus. When restricted to the 22-minute format, the laugh-per-minute ratio is decidedly improved.

I was hoping we’d get a full-on Stanley episode. More than any of the other supporting characters, I’m eager to learn more of his back story. He’s never really had an episode revolve around him like Oscar, Kelly and even Meredith has. I thought this was it, but he was just the appetizer. If the writers are reading this, please give us a Stanley episode! Maybe Michael has to come to dinner at Stanley’s for some reason, and while he’s girding up to enter “da hood” as he expects, he instead encounters a well-rounded middle class family environment that he’s actually jealous of.

The Finer Things Club subplot was fun. Notice that Andy is so dead set on being included that he actually bothered to read the book (he knew enough to know that the George Emerson character in A Room With a View is a Free-Spirit). Jim obviously has no such level of commitment. Oscar was right… he tried to get by on his wit alone.

This is the second time this year that the documentary camera is not only openly acknowledged, but actively intrudes on the action. If you’ll remember, when Michael’s car went into the lake in the gift basket episode, Dwight turned to the camera man in the back seat and yelled “Swim for it!” This time, it’s the camera man in the back seat that gives away Jim’s hiding place, despite Jim pleading with him to stay down.

The mention that the Scranton branch might be worse than even the Camden branch got me thinking. We’ve never seen the Camden branch, right? What if it were true that there was a MORE dysfunctional branch out there than Scranton? What if there was a branch so incompetent that even Michael could look down on them and feel superior (I know, he always feels superior by default, but what if for once, he was right?)? I’d love to see an episode involving this branch. Maybe they’d have an office with odd, mirror-image characters, like in the Bizarro Jerry episode of Seinfeld.

Line of the Episode: “The eyes are the groin of the head.”

Related posts:

1. Weekly The Office Discussion- Survivorman
2. Weekly The Office Discussion- The Deposition
3. Weekly The Office- Dinner Party