Series Finale: The Office

I'm waiting for the grand finale to The Office to drop into my iTunes, and saw this on the Atlantic re: what made The Office great is what eventually killed it:

The Office was always doomed to produce diminishing returns. The original theme it explored—office work sucks—is only funny if the characters never grow. What made the early episodes so dryly funny and morbidly relatable was that the seasons and the names of the meetings changed, but the paper-pushing remained the same. Just-another-cog-in-the-wheel syndrome only engenders pathos if the wheel spins indefinitely and the cogs stay put. But writers can only use constructed bonding experiences, like an awkward sexual harassment training session or an impromptu "Office Olympics," so many times to illustrate the lengths to which white-collar drones will go to survive another excruciating day. In television, things have to change.

So The Office's characters developed, and their individual stories gradually outshone the show's focus on survival in a corporate setting. By Season Five, the show was struggling to transition from a narrative about a listless workplace to a comedy that just happened to be set in an office. 

It wasn't helped by The Andy Bernard Problem either. In the beginning, Andy was the perfect elitist suck-up doofus willing to soar to heights of mediocrity until he could one day inherit his family's cocktail hours and beach houses. He was instantly recognizable as "that private school guy", but he was still likable and his eagerness to have Darryl like him was endearing.

But then, and maybe it's because The Hangover blew up, they decided we needed to have Andy Bernard shoved down our throats as much as possible. First they made him more like Michael Scott. Then they simply made him Michael Scott. And all the while, they seemed determined to show us how talented Ed Helms was at everything other than being a watchable sitcom character. Oh look, Ed can play guitar. Oh, Ed can sing. And do theater. Hey, did you know he can play the banjo? Well, it's been more than four minutes since we showed you so here goes!"

To their credit, the writers seemed to finally realize this, and the show finally became great again in this last season once they gave up on The Goddam Andy Bernard Project and just said fuck it and put him on a boat for months. It's obvious how removed he is from the others in the next-to-last episode; as we started saying goodbye to the characters, his scenes looked they weren't even from the same show.

It's tough enough losing Michael Scott, but they totally botched it by trying to shove Andy to the front row. I'm just glad this second half of the seaosn has been one for all-time, and I can't fucking wait to see the finale.