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If you gave me a paper plate loaded with all the ingredients to make a burrito, I wouldn’t be that interested. But if the plate was a tortilla, and you rolled it up, I would be very interested. The Office is like a television tortilla that has wrapped up everything I ever wanted from a series and made it into the perfect small screen burrito.
So I’m guessing you needed to write a column today, and all you’ve been doing is sitting around watching episodes of The Office that you downloaded on iTunes, and you had a burrito for lunch.
Uh, yes. That’s all accurate.
But I’m not just taking what I had for lunch, mashing it together with my new favorite TV show, and creating a convenient analogy. Well, I am, but there’s substance to it. It’s a case of me writing something out of laziness, rereading it, and realizing that it totally works.
If you’re wondering how I write, try the following thought experiment: Say you always dressed in the dark. And also say you never paired your socks together when they came out of the dryer. The chances of you putting on a matching pair of socks are pretty slim. But let’s say you turn on the lights and see that you’re wearing one red sock and one green sock. Well, good news – they represent port and starboard, so that’s why you’re wearing those socks. And if the green is on the left and the red is on the right, don’t worry – it’s opposite day.
By the way, the other day at work I told my manager, Jill, that it was opposite day, so everything I said would be the opposite of what I meant. She groaned – I guess because she thought opposite day was going to be annoying. So I said, “Actually, I hate opposite day. I would never play that game.”
“Oh, good,” she said.
But I started laughing because obviously what I meant was that I love opposite day and I will always play that game.
Going back to the socks: That’s how I write. I write in a dark cave filled with bats. But when the lights come on, and the bats fly away, if I can make sense of what was produced in the dark, I keep writing. For example, a few weeks ago I titled a column, “The Bull Named Fumanchu Comes After The Near-Death Experience,” but it wasn’t until one of my friends emailed me and said, “That’s disgusting,” that I realized that I had inadvertently created the image of a large mustachioed bull who sexually climaxed after scrapes with death. So, no, I didn’t plan the double-entendre. But yes, I’m proud of it.
So I will take the aforementioned burrito, tuck it under my arm like a football, run with it, but in the wrong direction toward my own end zone, and someone will yell at me to go in the correct direction, so I will turn around, sprint 87 yards for a touchdown, remove a gun from my waistband, and kill this football/burrito metaphor like I’m the running back from The Last Boy Scout.
The Office contains everything I ever wanted from a television show: it feels real, it’s very funny, and there’s romance (but not so much that it’s Grey’s Anatomy). Also, the awkward relationship between Jim and Pam is like every crush I’ve ever had on a future girlfriend (but I’ll return to this later).
In the meantime, it might be easier to see what I want from a television show if I first describe the perfect movie.
There are three categories of movies that I enjoy:
This is not a category. You just took two different genres and put a slash between them. They’re not even on the same shelf at Blockbuster.
Yeah, but Action and Comedy share two things in common:
A. When done properly, they are entertaining.
B. Women are never listed in starring roles on the poster.
Even though these film almost always have a romantic plot or subplot – take for example, Old School (Luke Wilson successfully attempts to win over the Grey’s Anatomy girl) or Batman Begins, (Katie Holmes unsuccessfully attempts to win over Batman) – they are primarily just vehicles for Will Ferrell to get mostly naked, or for Vince Vaughn to talk really quickly and get pissed off about something mundane.
I have always liked romantic comedy because it touches you in a place, your heart, that remains immune to fraternity brothers wrestling women in KY jelly or superheroes dressed as bats. Romantic comedies always have at least one man and one woman on the poster, and the man is usually Matthew McConaghey.
Serious movies can be funny or have action or romance, but they always, by rule, aren’t that funny or that romantic. They should make you think about life or society, and after the movie you should have a discussion about whether or not the lead actor and/or actress was worthy of an Academy Award, but then somebody should say, “Wait. Are we talking about the same award show that handed out Oscars to Crash AND a movie about hobbits?” And somebody else should say, “Yes.” And then everybody should agree that it’s pointless to talk about the Oscars anymore.
To see where the different categories affect your body, see Figure 1.
So what would happen if you added a Category I, Category II, and Category III movie? You would get a Category VI (I + II + III = VI) movie, which would be the best movie ever.
I will now randomly select three movies from Nicole Kidman’s career and combine them into one Category VI film:
Days of Thunder (action/comedy) + Birth (serious) + Eyes Wide Shut (romantic comedy) = Days of Wide Thunder Birth (A Category VI serious romantic action/comedy)
Actually, to be honest, I’ve never seen Birth, but the cover looks serious, and Eyes Wide Shut was definitely not a romantic comedy, but Nicole Kidman hasn’t really been in many romantic comedies, and Days of Wide Thunder Birth sounded better than any other combination I could come up with (even though it might be the title of a PBS documentary on women who give birth to extremely large-headed babies).
So that is what I would like to see in a movie, but it’s also basically what I want from a television show. Here’s the great thing about television though: a TV show can be better than the best movie because it lasts longer. Plots develop over time and we learn to love the characters. And since the action takes place over weeks, months, or years, it feels like it’s happening in real time. For example, When Harry Met Sally covers the span of like twenty years in two hours, so it’s like watching a highlight reel of the relationship between Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan. Stuart Scott might as well be narrating it.
But in The Office, the flirtation between Pam and Jim has lasted for years – our years, not movie years. And since it usually takes me several years to convince a girl that she should be my girlfriend, The Office feels real.
So the extended life of a television series gives that medium a one-I advantage over film, which makes The Office a Category VII television show (or to return to the burrito analogy, it has taken all the necessary ingredients (Categories I, II, and III – the meat, rice, and beans) and added something (the extra I, which is probably guacamole) to make the perfect burrito ß in reality, this is a Chipotle burrito).
There are five things that I love about The Office:
First, it feels like a reality show. It’s shot mockumentary style, with no laugh track, and the characters frequently acknowledge the camera. Very post-modern and kind of Category III-ish. Sometimes when I’m hanging out in the apartment and Dods says something stupid like, “It’s fun to do fun things,” I look at a mirror and make the face Jim makes when his boss, Michael, does something completely idiotic. But it’s a mirror, not a camera, so I don’t know why I do this.
Second, The Office is funny. Steve Carell is ridiculous as the boss. All the supporting characters are fully formed and basically perfect. And Pam would be funny even if she were a guy.
Q What does that mean?
A It means that she possesses a wit that is totally independent of her sex. That’s rare on a sitcom (exceptions include Elaine on Seinfeld and Cheryl on Curb Your Enthusiasm). Look at the three actresses on Friends. Even though they were all, at times, funny, most of their humor derived from standard self-deprecating female clichés. Rachel picked the wrong guys and was somewhat irrational, Monica was an OCD, controlling, housewife even though she wasn’t a housewife, and Phoebe was almost definitely retarded.
Pam is a receptionist, but she’s a genuinely funny receptionist, and the fact that she’s stuck in her low-level position actually shows that she shouldn’t be stuck in her low-level position, which is more a promotion of women’s rights in the workplace than the presence of Jan, the executive from corporate who takes her job too seriously and makes out with Michael just because he lands a big account with a client in a Chili’s.
The third thing I like about The Office is its humanity. Michael is an enormous jackass, but even after he’s forced to fire somebody, we get to see him depressed and lonely at home. Sure, this isn’t funny, but it’s very Category III-ish, and if we take the characters seriously, then we’ll think the funny moments are even funnier, like the part in American Beauty when Chris Cooper tries to make out with Kevin Spacey.
The fourth reason The Office is so good is because the relationship between Jim and Pam reminds me of every crush I’ve ever had on a girl that ended up being my girlfriend. And always those crushes were set against the backdrop of rural New Hampshire winters or muddy springs, or in buses after high school or college athletic contests driving through central Massachusetts, looking out the window at brown road snow, and listening to something way too melodramatic like The Cure or Elliott Smith. The girls I liked always had boyfriends, so I would be depressed because they were unavailable, but I would be slightly optimistic because maybe someday they wouldn’t have boyfriends. The Office, especially its opening title sequence, reminds me of all that.
Finally, most of life takes place in the Scrantons of America, not in L.A. mansions or New York apartments that would probably cost 3,000 in rent, yet are somehow inhabited by two unemployed twentysomethings.
The Office feels like real life, only funnier. And sometimes (this is probably why I look at the mirror thinking it’s a camera), when I watch the show, I think I’m Jim.
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