It Is A Drama, Not A Sitcom - The Office Season Nine

 

For eight seasons, The Office was a comedy sprinkled with drama, which is why it can be so off-putting to watch season nine. Without telling anyone, show runner Greg Daniels decided the final season would flip that script and become a very special drama with little in the way of humor. And once you understand this basic fact, The Office’s swan song starts making a lot more sense. The story Daniels decided to tell is a familiar one – what happens to us as we approach middle age? It is possible, although I cannot say it for a fact, that Daniels was particularly interested in this idea because he turned 40 during that final season, but it is clear, from the very first talking heads of the season premiere, that Jim, Pam, Dwight, and Andy would be the avatars through which Daniels explored this existential question.

The setup is unsubtle. For Pam, middle age is something to be embraced, not feared, whereas for Jim the opposite is true. She is settled into life as a wife and mother, attending ballet recitals and decorating the walls of her child’s room with her artwork. As she comments to the film crew, with two kids at home, nothing interesting is going to happen in their [her and Jim’s] lives for a long time, you can see Jim stiffen as she speaks. This is because the domestic bliss she welcomes feels like a death sentence to him. While Jim was never super excited about being a paper salesman, it hits home even harder when he learns that a college roommate has taken an old idea Jim had to start a sports marketing company and done so two hours away in Philadelphia. By the end of the episode, Jim has gone behind Pam’s back and contacted his buddy to express his interest in coming aboard. While Jim may have surprised Pam in the past, it was to do things like ask her to marry him or buy a house that they could move into as a married couple. But this choice was teeing up a heel turn that would find Jim acting in ways wholly unfamiliar to die-hard fans of the show.  

Dwight has a different problem - he is adrift as he approaches middle age. His professional ambition to be regional manager and his personal goal of marriage and fatherhood have been thwarted but he is at a loss as to how to change things. At work, he sees Clark (colloquially referred to as “New Dwight”) as a threat and feels the need to prove his manhood via a bizarre stunt that almost gets him killed while in his personal life Angela has married and had a child. While Dwight approaches middle age with uncertainty, Andy wants nothing more than to live in the past. His identity is frozen in time, when he was a “freaking rock star” in his college a capella group, while the present-day affords him little to do other than juvenile pranks like dubbing fart noises into a video of the staff playing softball. But that changes when his father bankrupts the family and absconds to South America. Suddenly, Andy must make capital A adult decisions and in response, after selling off everything the family owns, he decides to go on a months-long boat trip to escape reality.

To be sure, all of these feelings are ones people go through as they age – is this all there is? Am I happy with my life or do I want something more or different or new? It is just that having these characters, on this show, ask them, came out of left field considering the low stakes they tended to traffic in. When you understand what Daniels was going for, the entire season snaps into place. Jim and Pam become increasingly estranged as they fight over what their future will be. He increasingly sees it as one where she pulls up stakes and moves to Philadelphia so he can focus on Athlead full-time while she digs in her heels and insists that her life is in Scranton. As they struggle to reconcile these conflicting desires, their bickering escalates into fighting, which escalates into a standoff where neither is willing to meet the other halfway. And throughout, Pam is holding their family together while Jim lives a bachelor life in Philadelphia, where he rubs elbows with sports stars and has a rented apartment. If it doesn’t sound funny, it’s because it is not, but more, it pulled the rug out from viewers who were told over and over again that these two people were soul mates. While you could argue it was defensible to show a few cracks in that armor, Daniels’s almost pathological desire to tear them apart (he had to be talked out of having them divorce mid-season and then reconcile in the finale) showed a tone deaf understanding of the dwindling fan base that was still watching.

And while the Halpert marriage was disintegrating, Dwight seems to reach a point of acceptance that the initial path he saw for himself was not to be and tacked to a different course. Having been passed over for the regional manager position and then blowing his one shot, Dwight understood that no matter how many white whale clients he landed, if Andy could peace out for three months and still keep his job, he needed to recalibrate his expectations. This is where I thought the writers did good work showing Dwight, in his own oddball way, becoming the office’s heartbeat. He had no desire to leave the safety of Dunder Mifflin, he was Dunder Mifflin and whether it was his Christmas party or hiring of a junior salesman, Dwight was committed to his work and making his workplace a home. Similarly, when Angela rejected him once and for all by reaffirming her commitment to the Senator (even though their marriage was a sham), Dwight sought out Esther with the intention of marrying her instead.

Andy lacked that decisiveness. The three month boat trip was followed by a rash decision to pursue celebrity, the kind of thing one might do right after college and not right around the time your 15-year reunion is going to happen, but again, the impending creep of middle age makes people do weird things. If you squint hard enough, you can see this decision as being one similar to Jim’s attempt to reach for a new career path, but while Jim had at least established a solid track record as a salesman, as Phyllis says in a talking head about Andy, “there is just something there you do not want to watch.” And, like someone unfamiliar with adult decisions, Andy has not saved any money to pursue this dream, he just got more overdraft protection from his bank.

In a TV drama, any, or all of these story lines would make perfect sense because they track what happens in real life. Marriages do splinter, spouses grow apart or want different things out of life, professional ambition is sometimes thwarted, love is unrequited, family tragedy occurs, but for a show that was built on the banalities of the modern workplace and opted to illustrate it through the sale of paper, the most basic of office products, this was an enormous leap. For viewers accustomed to the comfort of a breezy situation comedy with a heart, suddenly being asked to ponder the meaning of life with little in the way of humor to leaven it was a very strange choice.

The ratings bore out the point. Although the show had been in a steady decline after Steve Carrell’s departure, they went into a free fall in season nine. The season nine premiere had an audience roughly half that of the season eight premiere and held at about that level until midway through the season when they dropped another 20-25 percent until the finale. In short, viewers were not buying what Greg Daniels was selling and while the numbers tanked, Daniels tacitly acknowledged the error of his ways. In a scene I like to refer to as the deus ex umbrella, as Jim is preparing to leave (yet again!) for Philly, he forgets his umbrella at his desk. Pam rushes out to the parking lot to give it to him and in that moment (coupled with a quick hitting montage of some high end “Jam” soul mate-ness) Jim realizes how wrong he has been and bails on Athlead to stay in Scranton full-time. The briefly introduced “Brian the Boom Guy” who we met several episodes before and was lingering as a potential shoulder Pam to cry on is never heard from again and all that marital strife that viewers were pummeled with for twenty episodes magically disappears.

It was a clumsy, albeit necessary corrective that very much does not reflect how marital discord normally resolves itself, but Daniels belatedly understood he had substituted his own story telling preferences for what the audience wanted. With the show nearing its end, splitting up a couple people were so invested in made absolutely no sense. Whether by design or luck, the other major storylines gave everyone the happy ending they deserved. Andy’s decision to quit opened up the manager’s seat for Dwight, who also ditched Esther when Angela and the Senator split up. Andy did not find fame, but got to live a college-adjacent life by moving to Ithaca and working in the Cornell admissions department. As for Pam and Jim, having reconciled and spent a year back in Scranton, they could now move on (and out to Austin). Life is rarely this neat and tidy, but the finale’s enduring popularity suggests that viewers understood the difference.