The Office – Did Dwight really need to taste the garbage bag to know that it was new?

The Office is a strange amalgam this season. There are many things each week that keep me laughing, and the show’s doing better for me currently than many other sitcoms I watch, like 30 Rock and How I Met Your Mother. But something is up with the writing. And not just the jokes, but the ideas that the writers use to string together episodes. What is going on?

The Office is a nonsensical show. And I make no argument that it shouldn’t be. If nonsense wasn’t my bag on TV, I wouldn’t have been able to stomach Michael and Dwight for all of these years. So that’s cool. But what isn’t cool are entire stories that make no sense as far as the actions a particular character would take. That’s not nonsense, it’s just bad writing.

What I’m talking about is the sales team’s attitude all episode long. Dwight made some sense, although I do wonder just how far he would have pushed it with a man he idolizes more often than not. But okay. And new Phyllis can be a real raging … lady at times. That’s really it’s own out-of-character story, because Phyllis is no longer Phyllis. And Stanley’s always been out to get his. But Jim and Andy? And the overwhelming snootiness and feelings of entitlement when all these people were combined? That it was unpleasant was perhaps one of the points. But when done by the whole, it also made no sense that they were behaving that way.

Because it was out-of-character, but also because what planet were they living on before to only now realize that the revenue producing employees were the favorites of corporate? Just because Sabre has the money to show it, when Dunder Mifflin likely didn’t, doesn’t mean that any salesman would only suddenly realize their worth to the company. And it doesn’t mean that Sabre changed — what, before they ranked accounting #1 in their hearts? And how was it that now that corporate was lavishing gifts on them the salesmen were making sales left and right? The whole thing just made no sense, in a bad way.

But here’s what I did like. Creed got new glasses, and he looked awesome. And as stupid as what Michael did with the leads was (which were a stupid waste of money in the first place), I did enjoy what the sales staff was forced to do in order to get them back. Jim got clues that were meant to teach him lessons and then find leads. Phyllis had to grovel before Angela, filling out a stack of forms destined for the shredder. These two have been battling since Phyllis muscled her way to the head of the party planning committee after catching Angela cheating on Andy.

Stanley had to sit through a Ryan and Kelly fight. He must feel so dirty to have agreed with something positive related to the Kardashians. Andy got Erin, which seemed a bit unfair until we saw just how awkward they could make even that little interaction. I’m not sure how he didn’t grab her breasts. And as unpleasant as Dwight was to even see last night, throwing him to Kevin was great. I just wish Dwight’s natural instinct wasn’t always to immediately go for the jugular. Literally. I would have been interested to see if Kevin could come up with something clever, or at least frustrating. Nice one liner by Dwight after Kevin told him the leads were in the trash — “Meredith, take off your dress.”

To the sales staff’s idea of giving the rest of the office 2% of their commission I say this: nice idea, but you’re going in the wrong direction. I’ve worked with salesmen before who’ve done something nice for the rest of the office in a show of thanks for their support, or whatever. But a share-the-wealth program is really for corporate to design. It’s unfair to sales to have to shoulder that burden, and it’s unfair to the rest of the office to make them receive charity checks from their colleagues every quarter. What they needed to do was stop treating everyone else like crap. And maybe buy them a nice meal spread once a month. But paying them out of their own pockets? They couldn’t have come up with a worse idea.

Okay, maybe giving them seashells. That would be worse.

“If they don’t have an iPod by now, they really don’t want one.” – Phyllis

Clacked by Aryeh S.
on Mar 19, 2010 @ 10:27 EST5EDT