The Office running thread

Erin's attractive in that "just plain enough you can fool yourself to thinking you are in her league irl" sort of way.

 

One of the funnier episodes in some time, though I agree with Waylon's assessment of Ryan. Might as well just write him out of the show.

 

Any show where we have to believe Michael Scott has risen to management should only have a shelf life of two seasons.

After that it's all gravy. Thus, The Office is now at a stage where it sometimes tastes good but lacks the depth to fully satisfy.

 

And yet later, Michael said he thought they were from Texas. Made no sense.

 

I really feel like this is the Ryan that has been there the entire time. He's always been pretty douchebaggy. Even when he and Kelly first began seeing each other, he always just wanted it to be a sex thing and she always forced the relationship on him. Dumping her the way he did was pretty much the exact character we're seeing now, only to a more extreme.

He went to New York. He rose to executive level management just because he had a business degree. No one even knew he was in the running for the job. And he showed he was pretty immature the entire season before he was promoted. I think that immaturity translated to the current level of douchebagedness we see now. He is that guy who thinks he's bigger than Scranton, but really isn't. He's the guy who wants to follow the trends because he think it will make people like him. That's why he "stays" with Kelly. She feeds his ego. I think we started to see this attitude pretty early in the show. The fire episode where Ryan didn't have the number saved in his phone after Michael had given it to him before is a fairly classic example.

The whole time he was the VP, he made it clear he was just out to be liked. He would come back and brag to guys like Kevin and Andy about how much his haircuts cost, and he would talk about the girls he could get with Michael. He just wanted to be the cool guy from the beginning and he's still trying to be the cool guy.

 

Yeah, Ryan always has been a self-consumed self-interested douchebag at heart. But that's NOT the contradiction: the contradiction is that in the first few seasons he was at least a rationale being with a high degree of self awareness, one of the few members of the office (along with Oscar, Toby, Jim and Pam) that were members of the rationale and self-aware coalition. In fact, quite many of the Ryan-related jokes in the first few seasons related to his befuddled reactions at the irrational behavior of Michael, Dwight, Andy, Creed and Kelly.

But in the last couple seasons they seem to have given Ryan a frontal lobotomy. Not a chance the Ryan from the 1st few seasons would be engaging in the "diabolical plot" and other directions where they've taken his character the last couple seasons. They've thoroughly excorcised the common sense and judgment from his brain that was there in the beginning.

I agree with Waylon. Basically his character ran its course and probably should've departed the show, but instead they decided to make him a comical nutjob alongside Dwight and the other "clown" characters.

And Arnold, good catch. I also noticed the contradiction between Michael acknowledging she was from Fla, and then making a joke of him thinking her from Texas. Guess the writers thought we wouldn't catch that.

 

Yeah, the Jim of yesteryear wouldn't have aspired to be a manager, either. What changed? Just about everything -- Pam and a secure life in Scranton being major things.

A lot changed with Ryan, too. He spent most of the first season saying how desperately he didn't want to work at the office after his internship, and how "I don't want a nickname because then I'd be one of the guys here and I really really don't want to be one of the guys here"

Since then he's risen and fallen really hard and seems at this point to have had his ambitions of bigger and better things shattered. He seems resigned to working in the office because well, that's the only place a drug addict who went to jail and was fired from his last job can get a job at this point. So, in accepting that, yeah, he's started to play the office games a lot more than he ever did in the past.

(Or, the writers just don't want to get rid of him and are making up dumb shit. One or the other.)

 

BJ Novak still works as a writer/co-executive producer/supervising producer on the show, so I'd imagine they won't get rid of the character, even if Ryan does only show up once every few episodes.

 

It had it's moments, but this show is losing it's fastball rapidly.

The breast feeding moments were very funny, and very good especially the "first time" the baby grabbed on.

Everything outside of Jim and Pam was painful to watch. This show used to be so great. Although Erin's first reaction to the fax was very believable and very good.

For as stupid as the waiting to midnight joke was, it was a subtle jab at our current healthcare system. Hopefully a lot of Republicans could see how ridiculous health care can be in America.

 

Based on Dwight's character from the first few seasons, I could believe the way he acted. His character has seemed to evolve past that point the last couple seasons, though. I guess it's not out of the realm of possibility how silly he was being, but it is a little far.

Re: Angela, I honestly didn't even think about that during the show. You're absolutely right. Nothing we've ever seen from that character should make us believe she'd be OK with having a baby at this point in time.

 

Jim and Pam are the show's best characters, and they are the closest to normal human beings. Michael's best moments are when he is toned down and human.

They have just played out Dwight as the crazy loon.

 

To expect The Office to be fresh and funny now, what, six, seven seasons in? is ridiculous. You could put any of these episodes into the first or second season and they wouldn't stand out at all. It's impossible to do a sitcom without most of the characters and jokes getting stale. It happens to all the best (Oh, see, Norm doesn't want to pay his bar tab. Monica used to be fat and likes to clean and the Seinfeld clan is neurotic.)

If you're looking for something unique and funny, you're not going to find it on a show this old. But we still watch because at this point we're invested in the story and the characters and, ya know, sometimes Dwight going crazy still is funny.