If you strike, I will attack you with the North: The Interwebs weigh in on Jim & Pam, labor strife and surviving a winter of Office discontent (part 1)
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- January
- 27
News on the strike front looks hopeful, but the damage wrought by an unplanned mid-season hiatus can’t be undone. It hits close to home for fans invested in characters and plot developments charted across entire seasons as opposed to mere episodes.
You might think sit-coms would be immune to such disruption. But if you think that, you’re probably not a fan of The Office.
So, 12 weeks into the strike, it was time to take the pulse of the fandom. And there’s nowhere better to do that than The Watercooler at NorthernAttack.com, one of the oldest and most active Office fan communities on the Interwebs.
Folks there are opinionated but congenial, articulate but hardly above the well-placed “That’s What She Said.” They’re poetic, literary and admittedly obsessive about everything from Pam Beesly’s growth as a person to chronicling the most trivial minutiae about the show. And despite the strike, the forum still goes strong.
Over the next few days, I’ll share their thoughts on the show, the strike and getting by on reruns and fanfiction.
First up is Linus, 27, from Portland, Ore., a.k.a. DwightfromtheFuture:
10 words or less: Which side do you support in the writers strike and why?
The writers. Purely reactionary. I don’t much care for unions, but as a writer, I like the idea of writers being better compensated.
Presumably you’re watching less TV than usual lately. What are you doing instead?
Weeping softly into my pillow each night. Also, I’ve been reading, watching a whole bunch of movies on DVD that I had been meaning to watch for a zillion years, and teaching myself to be handy, which is . . . an adventure. I’ve never been much good with a hammer in my hand.
Office fans waited two and a half years to see Jim and Pam together only to have the strike hit. Two months in, the strike could wash the season away. What do you think about that?
Honestly? I hate to say this, but the fourth season of The Office had been distinctly sub-par, and I’m hoping that an extended hiatus will help the show’s writers re-charge the batteries. The Jim & Pam storyline was truncated, which is too bad, because it was about the only part of the show that felt right to me — but I think there are a lot of interesting possibilities in skipping nine or ten months in the timeline. Look what it did for Battlestar Galactica.
Jim and Pam aside, what are you missing the most with the show on unscheduled hiatus?
Jim and Dwight, no doubt. That’s always been the funniest part of the show for me, and their complicated relationship is one of the more interesting dynamics on The Office.
How’d you like the way things were going overall on the show when the strike hit?
I guess I sort of answered this already, but my honest feeling is that they were going poorly. I know a lot of people disagree, but to me the show’s tone has shifted distinctly in the last year or so — the dramatics are more histrionic and less subtle, and Michael and Dwight have both become stupider (and by dint of that, more conventional) than they used to be. I have a hard time putting my finger on it exactly — I sometimes feel as though, if I could explain precisely what I mean, everybody would be able to understand what I was seeing — but on the whole, the comedy is broader, and the whole show feels less real to me. I don’t need to see Michael, Jim and Dwight wearing fake mustaches and micturating into soda cans. I’m not above a little low humor, but it’s not why I tune into The Office, and the show was losing my attention before the strike started. Too many field trips, too many wacky antics, too few moments that had me thinking, “Its funny because it’s true!”
Would you rather see the strike end now and The Office back on for even just a few episodes, or would you rather they scrap the season and take the extra time to return strong in the fall?
I’m conflicted, but honestly, I don’t want anything too rushed. I’d prefer the creative minds regroup and get something going that doesn’t feel like a rehash of plots we’ve already seen or a lame, seen-it-a-million-times sitcom arc. I also feel like there could be some extremely difficult questions to answer if the strike ended tomorrow and we got four or five episodes come May — for instance, actress Angela Kinsey is pregnant; how does that get explained without having it feel like fudging? I don’t know. So — I would rather they should take their time, I guess.
Bonus round: Fill in the blanks
1. This strike sucks. Everybody should be sentenced to a year of According to Jim/My Two Dads/Blossom reruns for making this happen. Oh, wait.
2. Phyllis and Bob Vance make such a great couple. They’re like the Brangelina of the northeast Pennsylvania paper distribution industry.
3. I still can’t believe Michael followed his GPS into a lake. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve seen on TV since game seven of the 2003 ALCS.
4. _ looked so much better this season, especially with her new and seeing her with _. . . . Gosh, I tried so hard to come up with something that wasn’t a lewd comment on Jenna Fischer’s recent reëntry into the dating pool, but I just couldn’t.
5. The strike has been particularly rough on my Office obsession. In fact, the strangest thing I’ve done since the hiatus began was when I stared into space for five solid minutes while I listened to my talking Michael Scott greeting card say, “Leader . . . ship. The word ‘ship’ is hidden inside the word ‘leadership’, as its derivationâ€? over and over again.
This entry was posted
on Sunday, January 27th, 2008 at 10:30 am by Brian Howard.
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Hmmm, I don’t think the card-listening was that weird. My mother and I did that with the Michael card we found in a Hallmark card shop. The people working there probably wanted to kill us. Especially since we went in, asked where the talking office cards were, and afterwards left without buying anything…
It’s ok to weep into your pillow. You gotta let it out sometime.
I in addition feel teh same way you are feeling about Jim and Pam.