Last night’s episode of the Office, Viewing Party, was not a bad episode of The Office. I wanted to state that early because my review might sound fairly critical. It’s only because I love The Office. It used to be the show I looked forward to the most all week. Now it has fallen to my 4th favorite show on Thursdays. With any comedy it’s hard to sustain success as long as The Office had. But its episodes like this one that frustrate me because I see a lot of good in it. The middle of the episode had many funny moments and showed me that these writes still know what makes the Office such a good show. The frustrating part was that there was still a lot of stuff that did not work. The cold opens this season have been terrible. I feel like they have been drawn out and have been referencing things that we don’t care about. Yes, continuity is a good thing and it’s nice to see that they didn’t forget about the Scranton Strangler, but referencing something just for the sake of referencing it is not funny. They need to go back to focusing on Dwight and Jim in the cold opens, because those were by far the funniest ones (The Pavlovian experiment Jim did on Dwight with the Altoids comes to mind).
I also feel that one thing the Office used to do well was subtlety. The characters were written so well that we as the viewer did not need things spelled out for us. They seem to completely have gotten away from that and that was very evident in the Michael as a father figure to Erin storyline. We got the point throughout the episode that Erin was like an insecure child looking for Michael’s approval, and the idea itself is funny even though it has been done to death in sitcoms. My problem came when they actually had Michael act like a father and Erin act like his daughter. Not only did it assume that the viewers were not intelligent enough to figure this out for themselves, it was also very uncomfortable and awkward (and not in the good way that the office used to do so well). I’m also really tired of them beating us over the head with Andy and trying to turn him into Michael Scott 2.0. Andy was a great character in this ensemble when he was used in small doses like all the others. Creed is my favorite for example, but if every episode focused on Creed, I would end up disliking him.
QUICK HITS
I found it really odd that not only did NBC center an episode of their programming around a hit show from another network, but actually used clips of that show. Has a show ever done that with another show that’s still on the air?
“I wanted to eat pigs in a blanket… In a blanket”
“Honestly, That show? It’s irresponsible”
“I wonder if there's a guy in China right now, looking at a bunch of our stuff."
"If I had to choose between a tall dude who loved Asia, and a you-looking dude who loved sweaters? I'd choose you. And I'd blow your mind."
Again, I did not hate this episode. It was light years better than last week’s episode. I’ll give it a 6 out 10
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