While The Office may have technically been an
ensemble cast, there was a clear first-among-equals: Steve Carrell. For more
than 140 episodes, Carrell’s portrayal of regional manager Michael Scott
anchored the show. When Carrell announced his departure before the show’s
seventh season, the writers were left with a massive challenge: how do you
replace your show’s biggest star? Their response, to elevate a mid-tier
character into a major role and introduce a new character completely at odds
with the show’s well-established aesthetic, was a disaster. Ratings plummeted
and critics panned the show’s eighth season. So what went wrong? In this post,
I am going to examine that question.
At a basic
level, the biggest failure was squandering the time the show runners and
writers had to map out what they wanted the show to be after Carrell left.
Although Carrell’s departure was announced in advance of season seven, he still
appeared in more than twenty episodes and the writers had ample time to think
through the show’s future and yet it does not appear much work was done in this
area. Rather, much of season seven was devoted to fan service, from Michael’s
reconciliation with Holly to a screening of Threat
Level Midnight and so much in between. It is as if the writers focused all
of their attention on giving Carrell a proper send-off (which, in fairness, he
deserved) without pausing to sketch out what they wanted to do once he was
gone.
The biggest
decision they had to make was who would take over as regional manager and, by extension,
become a primary focus of the show. This was no small thing. Over the years,
the show revolved more and more around Michael, conditioning the audience to
think of the regional manager as the main character in the story. There were a
couple of logical candidates – Jim or Dwight, but each was bypassed. The former
had a brief run as co-manager at the beginning of season six (The Promotion), while the latter was
given a one-off, one episode chance immediately after Michael’s departure (Dwight K. Schrute, Acting Manager). Darryl
was another deserving applicant but was ultimately skipped over as well.
Instead, the
writers made an understandable, but key mistake. If you read through books that
have been written about the show, you know that the decision to pick Ed Helms’s
character Andy Bernard as the new regional manager was based on the attention
he received from his role in the movie The
Hangover. Much like Steve Carrell’s star turn in The 40 Year Old Virgin, which gave the writers a chance to reboot
Michael’s character (and for people to give the show a second look after a
tepid, six-episode first season), the writers thought Helms’s newfound
celebrity would keep longtime viewers watching while attracting new viewers
based on Helms’s movie performance, but the opposite happened. Why?
I think there
were a couple of reasons. First, “in universe” as they say, elevating Andy made
little sense. He was, at best, a middling salesman and certainly not on par
with either Jim or Dwight (not to mention Stanley) and never exhibited much in
the way of leadership. All he had going for him was an Ivy League degree. For
whatever Michael’s shortcomings, there was never any doubt he was a great
salesman and, in his own way, a strong leader. Andy, on the other hand, was neither
of these things but instead of leaning into his country club preppiness and
making him into a villain out of a 1980s John Hughes movie, or, perhaps more
provocatively, having him come out as gay, either of which would have been in
keeping with who we know Andy to be, the writers made their second mistake.
When we first
met Andy, he was portrayed as a sort of bizarro Dwight, the office suck-up in
Stamford given a phony title to make him feel better. But after his anger
management issue in season three, he became nothing more than a bland WASP with
a touch of entitlement (did you know he went to Cornell?) and little in the way
of sales skills, but in order to make Andy a counter point to new addition Robert
California (about whom we will have more to say later), the writers decided to
do a massive, almost overnight reboot of his character into a plucky underdog
with unresolved daddy issues who we were supposed to root for. And it just did
not work.
It is one thing
to transform a character over time, as the writers did with Michael, allowing
him to grow, make mistakes, and ultimately, change for the better. They could
do that because the “bad Michael” of Season One was a blip, a six-episode
maniac whose personality changed organically, and through emotional growth,
over the following six seasons. Greg Daniels’s famous edict beginning in season
two that no matter how badly Michael behaved or was treated in any given
episode, he must also get a small “win” allowed for this evolution. Andy, on
the other hand, was an established character with about 100 episodes under his
belt as a rich kid dilettante who we were suddenly supposed to feel bad for
because he did not live up to his parents expectations. The shift was too
abrupt. It is hard to get behind someone who openly admits they don’t know what
they are doing, as Andy did on multiple occasions early in season eight,
especially when other people were clearly more qualified. Had the writers
leaned into this white male privilege not as a sign of insecurity but of
unearned bravado, it might have been interesting; instead, they asked us to
sympathize with someone who had everything in life handed to him.
Gone too was the
subtlety used in humanizing Michael’s character. To take one example, in season
two’s Take Your Daughter To Work Day,
Michael shows an old video from when he was a child and appeared on a kid’s TV
show. When he is “interviewed” by a puppet on the show and asked what he wants
to be when he grows up, he says he wants to be married with 100 kids who can’t
say no to being his friend. It is a quietly devastating scene that does not
require further comment. By comparison, consider season eight’s Garden Party. Andy hosts the event to
impress his parents, but has a meltdown because his father prefers singing a
duet with Andy’s brother. The two have a
heart-to-heart where Andy’s dad dismisses Andy’s job at a “rinky dink” paper
company and tells Andy to stop seeking his approval. The message was as subtle
as a sledgehammer, lacking the nuance and pathos that came with seeing
Michael’s vulnerabilities exposed. It was almost as if the creative team
believed all the characteristics that made Michael Scott such a compelling
character could simply be transferred over to Andy, as if these were traits
unique to the job of regional manager, not the person who sat in the
chair.
And maybe all of
this would have been salvageable if the other big gamble the writers took had
paid off, namely, Robert California. I am not a reflexive “RC” hater. To the
contrary, a few of his lines are not only the best of the season, but among the
funniest from the entire series, and again, on paper, the idea of injecting a
character who vibrates at a different frequency than the rest of the cast was
not a terrible idea, but the execution was awful. Originally cast as a one-off
applicant for Michael’s job (Search
Committee), the writers were apparently so pleased with James Spader’s
interpretation of the Robert California character as a sort of shaman with
Jedi-mind trick powers, that they decided to bring him on as a full cast member
for season eight.
The problem, or
at least one of the problems, was that Spader was unwilling to commit to
appearing in every episode, so instead of making him the regional manager, the
writers contrived an idea where he accepted the job but then backed out,
somehow convincing the company CEO to give him her job instead and then
promoting Andy to Michael’s position. Left unanswered was why Jo Bennett
willingly gave up her job, why the (new) CEO of a company based in Florida
spent so much time at the branch office of one division within the entire
corporation and, as the season wore on, why he picked someone he so clearly
disliked.
That aside, like
a spice that can enhance a dish but overpower it if too much is used, Robert
California worked less as a character the more he was incorporated into the
storylines. Glib one lines like “sometimes the flowers arrange themselves” (Get the Girl) worked nicely to emphasize
Robert’s eccentricity, but when they devolved into lengthy, and often
incoherent monologues like the one delivered at the end of that season’s
Halloween episode (Spooked), blank
stares, not just from the cast members, but the audience as well, were the
result.
As the season
wore on, you could see the writers struggling with what to do. Robert devolved
from an inscrutable mystery man to a run-of-the-mill bad boss, who used drugs
and alcohol liberally and preyed on his female underlings. Perhaps this was
done to get the audience on Andy’s side, as he had been a constant punching bag
for Robert all season long, up to and including their post-Tallahassee blow out
that resulted in Andy’s firing, but like so many other things that season, it
all felt rushed and a bit forced.
This mess at the
top was compounded by the fact that there was so little to work with among the
other main characters. Andy and Robert became the equivalent of load bearing
walls carrying too much weight. That was in no small part due to the fact that
Pam, Jim, and Dwight, all of whom featured prominently in the early seasons,
were given less and less creative runway as the show focused more and more on
Michael. For example, while the early seasons were loaded with Pam and Jim
will-they-won’t-they content, that storyline resolved at the end of season
three. Subsequent seasons saw little for the couple to do. They got their two,
two-part season six episodes celebrating their wedding (Niagara) and birth of their first child (The Delivery) but otherwise it was pretty much a dry hole. Yes, Pam
toggled between jobs and had a New York mini-arc and Jim had a brief flirtation
with middle management (The Promotion)
but compared to the intense focus on them in the show’s early seasons, it was
thin gruel. Similarly, Dwight, after spending the show’s early years as
Michael’s loyal sidekick, was also left with little to do since his only
objective was eventually succeeding Michael. His vibe was a little too weird
(sorry, individualistic) to lead the
office, leaving him in his own on-again-off-again storyline with Angela. And
while the two were well-matched based on their own idiosyncrasies, to maintain
a frisson of tension between them required a revolving door of other partners
(Andy and the Senator for her, Isabel for him) to keep things interesting.
For Dwight, the
best they could come up with was continued frustration over being denied the
top job (his one attempt at vengeance being the season’s sixth episode, Doomsday) resulting in his making a play
for a management position in Florida. But in order to sell this idea, we were
asked to suspend belief and erase from our minds the fact that Dwight was a
beet farmer in Pennsylvania who never gave any indication of being willing to
pull up stakes and head south.
Jenna Fischer’s
real-life pregnancy necessarily limited what the writers could do with Pam in
the early part of the season, but their decision to introduce Kathy Sims not
just as Pam’s temporary replacement as office administrator but a possible
romantic interest for Jim made no sense. Like asking us to believe Dwight would
leave Scranton for Tallahassee, the idea Jim would cheat on Pam (and
particularly for the sole reason that she was pregnant) ran counter to
everything we knew about these two people, whose relationship we were told over
and over again was the embodiment of soul mates coming together. The end result
were unbelievable story lines that petered out limply; Dwight skulks back to
Scranton without a promotion, Kathy disappears, with no explanation for what
happened to her or where she went when the team came back from Florida.
In the end, the
writers partially corrected their mistakes. Robert California was written out
of the show, never to be seen, heard, or mentioned ever again. But instead of
moving on from Andy as regional manager, they made the bizarre choice of
returning him to the seat in a ham fisted (and truncated) cribbing of the
Michael Scott Paper Company storyline from season five. Unlike that multi-episode
arc that grew out of an explicable story line, the writers wedged Andy’s return
(and Robert’s departure) into a rushed ending in the season’s final two episodes,
with Robert closing a branch and losing a major client that Andy scoops up and
then leverages to pitch David Wallace on the idea of buying back Dunder Mifflin
and rehiring Andy. This decision would foretell even worse mistakes in season
nine, but that is a story for another blog post.
