Re: Dinner Party

From now on, I'll save my obsessive Office knowledge for each episode's Wikipedia page. Under "Notes," those last four are my additions. I'm not sure how I feel about that, knowing this much about a fictional television program, fictional characters and, also, the fictional minutia of said characters.

As I mentioned a long while back, I sort of "was over" The Office once the strike started. Last night was too much of a countdown waiting for the airtime, and with the show being Eh instead of Great, I think I'll just ride out season four and wait for season five on DVD. Not worth whittling away an entire Thursday evening for twenty-two minutes of mixed expectations.

The news of the spin-off is just too much; and yeah, I own the Dunder-Mifflin warehouse shirt and the World's Best Boss mug and the Dunder-Mifflin robe (as seen in "A Benihana Christmas") and the Dwight Schrute bobblehead (three out of four were gifts, in my defense), but it's also too much that, as soon as the episode aired, Jan's candles were for sale at the NBC Universal store. That's American broadcast television: as long as you can squeeze a buck, you beat that dead horse, not unlike if said dead horse were a money pinata. It's nothing new, but for a show that trusts its audience intelligence, that once went for dark satire instead of wacky zaniness and zany wackiness (there's a difference) instead of making lame, obscure, rabid-fan-pleasing references to past episodes (Hunter's band, etc.), it's still disheartening.

With the original, Gervais and Merchant got in and got out in two three-hour seasons and said everything they needed to say; I'm starting to think the special was unnecessary (same with Extras). It was called "The Office" and it took place in an office, and it was about the soul-draining day-to-day of wearing a tie and working with people you don't like in a place you don't want to be. And now, four seasons into the American version, and with a full fifth season ordered by NBC, I imagine we'll have more "field trip" episodes to characters' wacky houses (though I prefer the Scott-Levinson Condo much more than the shark-jumping Schrute Farms). I'd rather be wanting more than wishing it ended at season two its peak. I guess I'm now one of those fuddy-duddies that, now that The Wire and Deadwood are over, is saying TV Is Dead, etc. Case in point, I've read two books this week and, god forbid, I actually enjoyed myself.

But if next week's episode is really funny and if the finale hooks me back into the show, all the above is void. That is, until another Eh episode brings me back to all this gloom and doom.