The Office

After watching Series One I have decided it is probably the best season of any show I've ever seen on television. Almost every joke is a keeper and the main cast is just amazing. First off, there's David Brent: the boss. He's basically an egomaniac and sees himself from a viewpoint so different from his co-workers that it's really quite pathetic. That's where most of his humor comes from though. It's a long series of verbal misteps and incorrect judgements of just about everything. For all his faults he seems to have a good heart deep down and you love as well as pity him. Then there's Tim. He's a bit more of a straight man. He gets less jokes but still has a good sense of humor. He's the everyman of the program and between his suppressed yet always developing relationship with Dawn, his self doubts and his self-consiously low self-esteem, he is a truly relatable character who provides the show with the bulk of its drama. Last but not certainly not least in the line of what I would consider the primary characters is Gareth. He is the perpetually scene stealing dead-pan funnyman who never even realizes that spends most of his time being utterly ridiculous. Between his naivity and his misunderstanding of the way the rest of the world veiws him, the man is life a David Brent in training, except that without even trying, he is a lot more of "a laugh" then Brent himself.
This happily controlled chaos is shattered in Series Two though. The uncomfortable humor is intensified, while the deadpan absurdity, is pushed to the backburner. The show's brilliance really lied in its perfectly equal balance between the sad and nearly paniful, and the hilarious. Now that balance has been lost. David's new enviroment is much less accomodating to his personality. He has a boss now, a change that bruises his ego like a sledgehammer. When he tries to compensate for this loss of power it backfires. Now that someone can chastise him, they are more than willing to. While his old staff had grown accostomed to him and excepted his boorish behavior, this new batch of co-workers is completely unaccostomed to such an eviromnt and many are not all too shy about voicing it. Plus the addition of a black staff member and one who is handicapped provide new fuel to the fire of his poor etiquette and problematic social skills. Tim's relationship with Dawn has been sidetracked and further complicated by the arrival of a new love interest that is much more availible and willing. Luckily Gareth hasn't changed. However just about everything else has. It is like a whole new show. The balance has shifted. It is now more realistic, and therefore more sad and often painful to watch. The episodes often end abruptly and jarringly. While it is more dramatic, it has lost a lot of subtlety and is less enjoyable to watch. But then again, I've got to give a lot of credit to show that can sucessfully switch from hilarious comedy with a strong undercurrent of drama, to (oh so) heartwrenching drama with a strong undercurrent of comedy. Whatever the show's creators set out to do, they suceed to such a great degree, that their work is sure to go down in history. This show needed it's own thread badly, so here it is. Let's Discuss.

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"Like all dreamers, Steven mistook disenchantment for truth."