800 Words: The Office - Made in America

Of all the NBC Thursday night shows of its generation, The Office was the best. None of these shows were truly and consistently ‘great’, but every one of them was a stellar attempt to make something better than an assembly line sitcom. And of all of them, perhaps The Office was easily the best. 30 Rock got justified plaudits for artistic consistency and integrity which The Office often lacked, but it was able to be so consistent because Tina Fey’s sensibility was always PG and tied to the ridiculousness of sketch comedy. Community was allegedly more intelligent; perhaps it was but for all Community’s high-concept humor, the show was never as funny as its most vocal supporters allege - and sometimes just clever in a way that’s humorlessly pretentious. Parks and Recreation is a wonderful show, but its aims are both smaller and larger than The Office. Parks and Rec often strains to show the entirety of the American political landscape within the confines of a small midwestern town’s government bureaucracy. It’s amazing how often Parks and Rec succeeds at doing precisely that, but it’s still not as amazing as The Office.

(My all-time favorite clip.)

Pam got it exactly right in the show’s last line when she observed that the most beautiful things are often the most ordinary. What makes The Office work, in country after country apparently, is that it’s concept is so universal - the workplace and the weird people who populate it - that it can be fleshed out with people so numbingly specific to the country in which it airs that each country could easily be people with whom they work, or live next to, or a relative. And every time The Office strains credulity with the over-the-topness of its antics, we have to wonder, are so many people we know less ridiculous?

(Dwight’s speech. Terrible sound, but probably the show’s emblematic scene...)

Let’s leave aside all the obvious flaws for a moment and the places where The Office went severely wrong, because it’s so strange to think about how rare a show like The Office is. Here is a TV show which had thirty main characters over nine years and well over a hundred secondary characters which longtime watchers could identify by name, and virtually all of them played excellently by their actors. The Office is a world so detailed that it couldn’t be anywhere else, and yet it was exactly like everywhere we’ve ever known. And like everywhere we know, it shows a business culture on an inexorable path to self-destruction. The world of The Office was a perfect indictment of contemporary America, made just in time for the greatest recession of our lives.

(Michael v. Toby)

The Office was a comedy, but it was a comedy in the minorest key imaginable. In many ways, the show was still darker than the British version upon which it was founded. The British Office was pure misanthropy. It saw its characters as irredeemably flawed and banal, completely deserving of their mediocrity. It had a very British conceit that these workers should ‘know their place’, and therefore asked for all their humiliations by aspiring to be more than they were. The American Office, inconsistent and sloppy as the British version was reliable, is a far more ambitious comedy. It began on the premise that all things are possible in America, and then asks why life is not better than it is. If the American Dream exists, then why has nobody lived it?

Rolling Stone referred to The Office as the emblematic show of our time. I wouldn’t quite go that far (especially now that Arrested Development returns next week), but I would say that The Office, during its many best moments, was more than that. It was the most American goddamn thing on TV.

And it wasn’t just America, it was pure Pennsylvania too. Every one of the NBC comedies had a character that existed in a life past the 2-D cardboardness of pure sitcomery (even good sitcoms). In 30Rock, it was Jack Donaghy. In Parks and Recreation, it’s Ron Swanson. In The Office, it was, obviously, Dwight Schrute.

Dwight Schrute is the scariest man on television. Dwight is not a villain, but he was a perfect explanation of how Americans become villains. Dwight Schrute is the American ‘system’ gone awry, with self-reliance gone into caricature, corporate hierarchies becoming a fetish, intelligence finding its worst applications, and family upbringing making you completely unprepared for the modern world’s complexities. He is perhaps the most specifically drawn character of his time, and when we enter the world of Dwight Schrute, we enter a world in which the rules of reality bend almost 90 degrees. If you want to understand the Tea Party, look no further than Dwight.

But you could expound in the same way about Stanley, or Oscar, or Phyllis, or Jan, or Creed, or Meredith, or David Wallace, or Bob Vance, or Mose (!!!), or the fantastic stupidity of Kevin (you don’t really need Kevin, but come on...), or even Jim and Pam - perhaps the sole believably functional marriage in TV history, and a genuine inspiration for couples looking to make it work everywhere in American cities and towns where the people around them are just as ridiculous as those at Dunder Mifflin.

But ultimately, even in his absence, it was Michael Scott’s show. The Office was a show about incompetence, and there was no one in the world more incompetent than Michael Scott. If Dwight is how Americans become villains, then Michael is the reason that villains like Dwight will take over America. Dwight is now Dunder Mifflin's boss, and while the show softened him at the end, how long are we really expected to believe this 'nice Dwight' will last before he begins a reign of lightening terror that ends in a zero hour orgy of blood?

For all his terrible qualities, and perhaps because of them, it is impossible to dislike Michael. But it’s Michael Scott’s very gullibility that both makes him a terrible boss, and inevitably the man who becomes the boss. Like so many Americans in today’s world, he believes that the very best which life has to offer is his for the taking, and can never understand just how wrong he is. It was the perfect role for Steve Carell, who has got to be Hollywood’s most gifted improviser, and he set the tone for dozens of actors to stretch their capabilities in one of the great ‘actors’ shows’ there has ever been. When you hear about the other people considered for Michael’s role - Paul Giamatti, Martin Short, Bob Odenkirk, Hank Azaria - it becomes interesting to think about how different the show might become. Only Odenkirk could have brought even a sliver of the same bumbling genius to the role - Giamatti would have been too serious (and a waste of a truly great actor), Martin Short too hammy, Hank Azaria too placid. It’s a shame that Steve Carell now wastes his abilities on focus-tested paydays, because there’s a frenzy of underused talent in that actor which only The Office used properly.

The Office first appeared in 2005 - which will perhaps be remembered as television’s ‘Golden Age’, an age when The Sopranos, The Wire, Arrested Development, South Park, Deadwood, and Curb Your Enthusiasm were operating at peak form. When Arrested Development comes back next week, we’ll see whether that ‘Golden Age’ can revive its magic ten years later. Arrested Development was a show from the early Bush years, when savage fears of a world we didn’t understand required savage satire (more on that in the weeks to come hopefully). The Office premiered in 2005, and became America’s best-known show around 2007. It was a show from the period when we Americans had to accept that the world was changing, and that America was completely ill-equipped to deal with the world as it was now constituted. There is nothing that becomes contemporary America like ineptitude, and no piece of art which showed better just how inept we are.

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800 Words: Must See TV Part 1

I.          

           

I’d like to think I grow tired of saying this over and over again, but clearly I don’t if I keep coming back to this point: if any foreigner or future scholar wants to understand America in the post Cold War era, all they’d have to do is watch TV. It’s not like there’s much competition: I can and have named dozens of TV shows that have completely altered the landscape of our culture. Many people say that we’re living in a Golden Age of International Cinema, but are there even fifteen American movies since 1990 that have completely shaken up the way American culture views itself in the manner of which the best dozen-or-so episodes of The Simpsons did, or South Park, or The Wire, or Mad Men (The Truman Show, The Social Network,  WALL-E, American Beauty; and if we’re being charitable maybe Juno, Forrest Gump, Minority Report, Pulp Fiction, There Will Be Blood, Fight Club… The Dark Knight is ultimately British…and after that I draw a blank)? Are there even half-a-dozen American plays since 1990 that have changed the country (Angels in America, Oleanna, Doubt, arguably Rent and The Book of Mormon if you count music theater…nothing but blanks after that…)? Think of how many ‘Great American Artists’ in today’s cultural world are clearly, unambiguously, unassailably at the very peak of their careers – artists whom most every critic and connoisseur in their field seems to agree will not ever, cannot ever get better than the work which they’re producing right now. Now think of how many of them are not television showrunners (Jonathan Franzen, David Fincher, Wynton Marsalis, Kanye West, Lady Gaga if that’s your kind of thing….blank…)  With so few exceptions, the way which American artists use movies, theater, literature, art, and music seem to grow ever smaller and more insular with every passing year. But the manner in which television is used seems to grow ever larger, more diverse, more ambitious, more epic. Overall, I suppose I prefer watching a great movie to great television – great movies suggest the ‘unfathomable depths’ in a matter of a few hours. A two hour movie requires less time commitment but just as much artistic reward at the end as 100-hour TV show, and utterly without the longeurs it takes to reach the end of a series. Movies are simply more interesting.

In a country like ours, which redefined everything which the arts can be, movies have virtually supplanted the importance of theater – often providing a more visceral, more flexible experience than live theater was ever capable of suggesting. But if movies are to us what theater was to Elizabethan England (but who’s our Shakespeare?), then TV is to today’s America what The Novel was to Czarist Russia. We could even play a kind of parlor game in which we create equivalents for Russian novels with today’s TV shows. Perhaps The Sopranos could stand in for Dostoevsky’s whirlpoolish psychological immediacy – the show could easily be renamed Crime and Punishment. Or perhaps Mad Men could stand in as a spiritual replacement for Tolstoy’s slow, critically distant psychological burn - think of the first line of Anna Karenina and imagine applying it to the marriages of Don Draper and Roger Sterling.

II.

Being a person with very few reasons to live, I grew up with NBC’s Thursday night lineup as the cornerstone of my week. Growing up, my weekends were inevitably disappointing: I didn’t much care for my friends, and the Baltimore Symphony was too expensive to go every weekend. Thursday night was the highlight of my week, because that was the night the new Seinfeld premiered, and that thought was enough to get me through one week of extended suburban ennui to the next.

With the omnipresent syndication and ubiquitous reruns (not that they don’t mean the same thing), it’s nearly impossible to remember how revolutionary Seinfeld seemed in the 1990’s. Seinfeld was more than a show about nothing, it was a show about taboos. Week after week, issues which none of us dare mention in polite company were discussed in barely concealed euphemisms: masturbation, public urination, breast implants, oral sex, faking orgasms, contraception, self-exposure, sexual techniques, fetishes, fears of responsibility, commitment, marriage, immigrants, the handicapped, social and sexual humiliation, dentistry, bullying, hygiene, the elderly, homeless people, blind dates, being perceived as racist or homophobic, social ‘inferiors’, and the truth. Seinfeld’s greatness came from constantly taking uncomfortable situations in which we’ve all found ourselves, yet none of us wants to admit we have. It then stretched those situations to the exact breaking point of believability.

If Seinfeld now seems like a completely different show than it did in the 90’s, it’s because all the greatest sitcoms were in fact a variation on that exact same trope. All In The Family made bigotry charming for white and black people alike. M*A*S*H showed people who never served in the armed forces that the experience of war is not all sacrifice and patriotism. Cheers allowed literate upper-middle class Yuppies to bond with loser alcoholics. The only difference between these shows and Seinfeld is that the latter broke taboos to an exponentially higher degree than any sitcom before it. Seinfeld seemed like a beginning, in which every issue could be discussed on television so long as there it’s done with sufficient cleverness; but 15 years after the show ended, we now see that Seinfeld was an end. After Seinfeld, all the taboos of what could be aired on television were broken, and we now live in a nearly taboo-free society of reality TV, pay cable series, and internet memes, where virtually any subject can be discussed openly and acceptably. Seinfeld still seems like a great show, but it seems almost quaint and prudish, as though it’s a show from another solar system where people have to talk in code. It seems downright weird to use terms like ‘master of your domain’ or ‘down there’ when today’s shows can discuss absolutely any issue with utter transparency.

III.

There were great shows before Seinfeld. Must See TV (NBC’s term for its Thursday night lineup) is older than I am, and included fine shows as different as Cheers, Night Court, The Cosby Show (I include that begrudgingly), Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, A Different World, Frasier, Wings, Mad About You, Friends (REALLY begrudgingly), ER, Just Shoot Me, Will & Grace, Scrubs (SOOOOOO begrudgingly), My Name is Earl, The Office, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, and Community (honorable mention to Andy Barker P.I., one of two Andy Richter shows that should have been picked up past a first season).

In an era of 300 channels, NBC might have more history than any channel save two others, but its best days are so clearly over. It’s difficult to forget that sight-gag on Family Guy in which NBC headquarters proclaims on its sign “We Used To Have Seinfeld, Remember?”

Like the other networks, only moreso, NBC has moved into the world of pay cable. NBCUniversal owns CNBC, MSNBC, USA, Bravo, Syfy, Cloo, Chiller, and Telemundo. It has large stakes in AMC, A&E, the History Channel, the Biography Channel, and National Geographic. This list doesn’t even include the overseas networks which NBC manages or the fact that NBC has a large share in TiVo.

NBC clearly understands that the name of today’s broadcasting is ‘niche’ – and there should be a niche for every taste and every demographic. But they still don’t understand well enough. Like any network, they are principally committed to preserving the dominance of their once ‘august’ brand – and will not preserve a show on their flagship network if it does not recoup a certain amount above the expenses it takes to make the show - how very 1985.

The rumors were abounding last week that NBC is cancelling its Thursday night lineup almost wholesale. For longer than I’ve been alive, Thursday night’s been the lynchpin of NBC television. But there’s something about the very idea of dominating a night of television that feels utterly old-fashioned. Nobody wants to dominate a TV night anymore, nobody who’s living in 2012 at least. At this point, sensible executives just want enough viewers to derive a reasonably large demographic against 300 other competitors. Anyone executive who sets out to make a TV show watched even by a quarter of those who watched Seinfeld every week is a guaranteed failure. The most watched non-reality TV show of the last year was NCIS, and it was watched by a weekly average of 11.6 million people.

Desperate Housewives, one of the highest rated shows of the last decade, will air its final episode this Sunday, and will be considered a stunning surprise if it rakes in anywhere near 15 million viewers. Let’s put that in a bit of context. Nearly ten years ago, the Friends series finale attracted more than 50 million viewers. Nearly fifteen years ago, the Seinfeld series finale attracted almost 75 million viewers (and was expected to attract a lot more than that). Nearly twenty years ago, the Cheers series finale attracted almost 85 million viewers. Nearly thirty years ago, the M*A*S*H series finale attracted more than 100 million viewers.

The age when any network or channel could coast on the strength of a single show is over and will never come back. In today’s TVcology, there is only competition – and even the highest rated shows can only appeal to a severely limited demographic. No two people watch all the same television shows anymore. 

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