The Office: Stress Relief
By fred | February 2, 2009
(S05E13) After the latest and post-Superbowl hour-long installment of The Office I find myself quite conflicted. I don’t want to say bad things about this episode, not because I love the show but because it did make me laugh, and yet at the same time I’m not sure I should say great things about it either, simply because quite frankly, I’m not sure this was a good episode.
I think the problem reside simply with what this was, a post-Superbowl episode. As such it had an obvious potential to grab the interest of millions of new viewers, most probably having never seen the show before, and this episode was clearly written with those people in mind. In the end, there might be tow different reactions to this episode : the one of new viewers, and the one of long fans who’ve been around since day one.
The former will probably have liked what they saw, because it was funny, in fact on more than one occasion this episode was simply hilarious, filled with laughing-out-loud moments. But as a long-term viewer, it didn’t really do it for me, I’m not sure it was really a good episode. For the occasion the show was back to the hour-long format, something we’ve seen last season wasn’t always a good idea for the show.
This episode was far from being the worst in that category, but we’ve seen better as well. I think the expanded length of the episode did hurt the show, as illustrated by the “special appearances by Jack Black and Jessica Alba” which, clearly, was useless. I mean Alba was probably on screen for a grand total of 8 seconds top, and if she got to say one word, probably “hello”, that’d be about it. And while we saw more of Jack Black, don’t think he was funny, cause he was not.
In fact, not only did I found this whole “movie” not to be funny, but I didn’t find the story around it be generate any laughs either. As far as I’m concerned, Andy’s reaction, missing that Jim & Pam were not talking about the movie at all but their own relationship, or the one of Pam’s parents, really didn’t make me laugh (Okay, maybe the very last time he’s hearing Pam it did). The whole thing felt to me like a filler plot trying to fill that one hour.
And since we’re on the topic of Jam, let’s have it. So Pam’s parents are having problems, something that came out of nowhere and, really, didn’t serve any purpose. Had this not be the Superbowl episode and all, one might have thought this could have been the first time we would really see some tension and trouble in the happy couple, maybe. Except that we all knew there was no way Jim would have told Pam’s father that half marriages end up in divorce, so he should just leaving the old lady and go have fun.
I mean come one, this is Jim we’re talking about here, and this is Pam’s folks. Of course he didn’t not any such thing, there was no twist there. I guess the idea was to give new viewers what we’ve been getting for a while now : a situation where it looks like conflicts are on the way (”What could Jim have said to make my dad want to leave my mom? And at what point in our marriage is he gonna say it to me?“), only to end by reinforcing their love and how perfect for each other they are, leaving them more happy than ever with an always delicious smile on Pam’s face (”When you’re a kid you assume your parents are soul mates. My kids are gonna be right about that.“).
Posted in Reviews
Shows: The Office
