Annoying
I finally became bored enough to succumb to getting caught up on The Office, including the wedding episodes. This has clearly set my recovery back a few days. Please, if I have another girl tell me to shut up with my criticism of Jim and Pam on the grounds of, “aww, they’re so cute!” I’m going to fucking explode.
I don’t give a fuck if they’re “aww, so cute!”. This is a so-called comedy show, not your fucking home videos or a Meg Ryan movie or the end of a reality special on ABC. The show is supposed to make me laugh, not gawk admiringly at a FAKE TV couple played by actors who are, in real life, married to entirely other people.
If Jim and Pam were real, I’d be rooting hard for them. I’d be glad they had a beautiful wedding, were madly in love and were spending the rest of their lives in marital bliss. If invited, I’d go to the wedding, give a generous gift and wait anxiously for them to upload photos from their honeymoon on facebook.
But this is a television comedy.
The Office, when it was winning awards, buttered its bread with great bit characters, painful moments from boss Michael Scott, the hilarious interplay between Jim and Dwight and the empathetic we’ve-all-been-there forbidden love between Jim and Pam. Half of those elements are gone, replaced by fucking mush.
Sure, we wanted Jim and Pam to get together. But it was so good because they couldn’t, and the viewer thought, “yes, I know exactly what that’s like!”. We loved to be tortured, and wanted more because we couldn’t have it. Once Jim and Pam got together, we stopped caring about them.
Especially because Jim ceased to be funny. At all. Serious co-manager? Give me a fucking break. This is the same Jim who said, in season one, that, “This is a job. If I advance any higher, this would be my career. And if this were my career, I’d have to throw myself in front of a train.”
Well, had you kept that promise, maybe the show would have been more interesting.
Really, they had a chance to fix it all, with a broken engagement or something equally crushing. That’s what The Office excelled at — making terrible situations painfully funny. But they decided to take the easy way out.
Sure, I’ll admit, the episode, taken in isolation, was one of the better Office episodes of late. I laughed a lot, actually (aside from that YouTube jump the shark dance scene). Largely, yeah, the writers brought their a-game. They better keep it up, making every single OTHER character this funny, week in and week out, because they’ve basically neutered half of what made the show great.
