Bohemian Cinema By Jonathan Pacheco

“The Office” (Season 3)

25 Episodes

Satisfaction:Frustrated Tags: TV, The Office, Comedy

In my Season 2 review, I praised The Office for having natural performances, surprising and excellent writing, and a sweet, lovely, charming air to itself. I feel cheated—none of those characteristics can be found in Season 3. Now it feels like I’m watching the show, crossing my fingers in hope of something original. I didn’t see that coming.

Season 2 left off with Jim (John Krasinski) finally kissing Pam (Jenna Fischer), and Season 3 opens with Pam no longer engaged to Roy, but not with Jim. After being rejected by his crush, he’s now working a few hours away in Stamford. He’s under a new boss with some new coworkers, but the truth is that the show’s core group members—Dwight (Rainn Wilson), Michael (Steve Carell), Pam, and Jim—need each other as comedic characters; so when one leaves, the rest fall apart.

Jim was the nucleus of this nucleus (or as Kramer would say, “the Miana!”), and this was very obvious once he left Scranton for Stamford. All of a sudden, Michael’s stupidity went uncontested. He and Dwight played off of each other, but after a while, it just became stale and slightly abusive (“The Coup” is a fine example). Pam was now on her own, and she couldn’t hold the show without anyone to riff with, making her just another woman in the office. Jim fared the best of the four because he had great new characters to deal with—Andy (Ed Helms) was there to mess with, Karen (Rashida Jones) was there to banter with, and Josh (Charles Esten) was there to admire—but every once in a while, he fell into a familiar routine of looking into the camera and shrugging.

The funny thing is that the show’s writers recognized all of these faults but never did anything about them. How do I know they knew? Because the show poked fun at its own problems. In “Gay Witch Hunt,” Michael holds a meeting and spouts out a particularly ridiculous line. Pam stifles a laugh and instinctively turns to the person next to her with a “Did he just say that?” face. Instead of finding Jim laughing along with her, she finds Ryan (B.J. Novak), who looks blankly at her and says, “What?” So you realize that Pam no longer has anyone to interact with; why don’t you do something about it? In the same episode, Jim is the new guy at the Stamford branch, and Karen confides to the camera that she doesn’t know how well Jim fits into the new group. She then say, “He’s always looking at the camera and going like this—” she shrugs and gives a crooked smile—then says, “What is that?” Okay, so you get that Jim is becoming a one-trick pony; why don’t you do something about it?

A fundamental flaw in Season 3 is that it asks us to feel for a character that ultimately feels unlikable. Prior to the branch merging, Jenna Fischer’s role this season was to replace Jim as the wisecracker of the office; she’s not up to snuff. It’s a different Pam and a lesser Pam. In the second season, Pam grew into her own interesting character and became someone you really wanted to see Jim with, but this season finds Pam single again, and “new and improved.” Seems that “new and improved” actually means “mean and self-pitying” because Pam spends half the season behind the desk, pitifully gazing at Jim as he jokes and flirts with Karen. When she’s not doing that, she’s not-so-innocently maneuvering to eventually win over Jim. It’s kind of like falling for the girl of your dreams, only to find out that once you get to know her, she’s a completely different person. I must say, I agree with Karen’s assessment: “Pam is…kind of a bitch.”

In this show, Michael rarely wins, and his charm is that he rarely realizes it. Every once in a while, the show builds Michael up just to let him down; that’s the show, and that’s life. But I get a bit upset when a lighthearted series like this one introduces a character simply to be torn down. Such is the case with Karen, and I’m pretty darn upset. Throughout the season, it became very apparent that Karen never had a chance with Jim, and nobody feels bad about it. The worst part is that the show focused on making Karen a likable person, and focused at times on showing Jim and Karen in a relationship that any guy would be jealous of. Yet everyone knows, through common TV sense and not-so-subtle clues, that Jim is going to choose Pam over Karen—period. So was the show making her a great character simply to try to “fool” us? I don’t appreciate that. You try to manipulate me, send a character to her ultimate doom, then expect me to cheer when the guy chooses the girl who has spent the entire season annoying me? Sorry, not gonna happen.

But The Office didn’t botch all of its characters. Karen, as mentioned, was a fantastic creation. Smart, quick, clever, and never afraid to call out Michael on his indecipherable jokes, she was so well portrayed that I’m furious she’s leaving the show. Andy started out just being the “Stamford Dwight,” but by season’s end, he was his own guy, and a hilarious one, at that; his speech patterns alone make him worth it. I also felt that Michael’s nemesis, Toby (Paul Lieberstein), got some particularly great moments as he secretly pines after Pam. For the most part, Ryan (no longer a temp) had some good moments as well, but when the show tried to give him more airtime, as in “Initiation,” B.J. Novak showed that he can write a good script and deliver some smarmy one-liners, but he can’t carry an entire episode.

After having his wedding called off, Pam’s ex-fiance Roy (David Denman) started rebuilding himself from scratch. Sporting a new beard and losing some weight, he vowed to win Pam back, and the unbelievable happened: I actually started rooting for this guy. A season ago, I couldn’t wait for him to get his comeuppance. Roy was now much smoother, much more humble, and much more appealing because he saw his mistakes and was learning from them. So two-thirds through the season, Pam and Roy got back together, and all of a sudden, the writers began to divert from the smart, grateful Roy and started portraying a shallow, clueless Roy. What happened? The change happened literally the episode after the couple joined, and it infuriated me. This character that you worked so hard to make appealing suddenly starts acting like an idiot again? Why? Fortunately, I believe the way Roy exited the season was much smarter than how he was acting in those last few episodes.

Looking back at what I’ve written, almost every paragraph so far has been about whether or not the show botched a character, and that’s because the show’s success was because of its characters. That’s something that should not be overlooked.

An interesting thread that runs through Season 3, intentional or not, involves Michael’s qualifications as a leader. Sure, past seasons always showed his incompetence, but this season had a coup for Michael’s job, his work environment being compared to a prison, Michael being compared to the Stamford branch’s Josh Porter (the “poor man’s Michael Scott” as he likes to call him), Michael actually losing his job for a little bit, at least three people quitting over Michael’s leadership, a customer calling for Michael to resign, and Michael applying for a better job and not getting it; that’s just off the top of my head. I really like that it was an overarching storyline that wasn’t explicitly portrayed or explained, but rather felt like it developed naturally and subconsciously.

I was surprised at how musical this season was. Characters did a lot of singing during the season (partially due to the fact that Andy was once part of a quartet during his days at Cornell; they called themselves “Here Comes Treble”). I remember a character at one point or another singing songs such as “Rainbow Connection,” “Hollaback Girl,” “Drift Away,” “Closer to Fine,” and “On the Wings of Love.”

Yet, as silly and contradictory as it sounds, I think what kept the season from succeeding was that the show was so concerned with manufacturing comedy, that it forgot how to have fun. There was a joy and a sweetness in the second season, particularly the first 4 episodes, and a natural air that made it feel like the show was totally shredding, while Season 3 felt like it was too concerned with trying to play the correct notes that were written on the sheet music. I didn’t feel the joy in what was going on. Only two episodes seemed to come close to being classics. The first was “Diwali,” which, while the beginning felt forced, the rest was fun with Jim and Andy being drunk in Stamford while the Scranton branch partied Indian-style.

The better episode, and most likely the best of the season, was “Ben Franklin.” It had a good mix of Jim’s mischief, Pam and Karen’s sarcasm (especially towards the initially clueless Benjamin Franklin impersonator), and Dwight’s gullibility (the final little scene of the episode is one of the funniest the show’s ever done). But I can tell you that something’s wrong when only 2 episodes spring to mind as being close to great when I can name 7, 8 episodes from last season just off the top of my head. This is not saying that every Season 3 episode was terrible, because I still find myself enjoying most episodes that were put out. But the season definitely had its share of duds, with empty episodes like “Phyllis’s Wedding” and “Business School.”

From episode one of this season, myself and fans of the series noticed that everything felt forced. Every single thing. The jokes were forced. The situations, instead of developing naturally, were manufactured (this is also what differentiates the latter seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm from the earlier, classic seasons). And worst of all, the ends are forced by whatever means necessary. Pam and Jim, at this point, don’t belong together, but the show is so keen on making them end up with each other that it’ll ignore the writing on the wall. Once again, this is made even more frustrating by the fact that the show recognizes it.

                    PAM
Jim and I are just too similar.  Maybe one day 
I'll find my own Karen.

It’s right there in front of their faces but they refuse to draw the inevitable conclusions. That’s annoying. I’ll keep watching next season, but I’m not holding my breath.