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.  

And What Is Going On? The Office Season Eight

 

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.