Brian Baumgartner as Kevin. / NBC
It’s summer, and the writers’ strike is over, which means that it’s time for the broadcast networks to finally launch some of that original online content that everybody was so exercised about last winter. Today is the debut of this summer’s webisodes of The Office. (The first is scheduled to post at 3 p.m. E.T. on nbc.com; new eps go up weekly.) I’ve seen four of them, and unlike many online spinoffs of TV shows, they’re actually worth your time.
Not a ton of your time, mind you, but at two minutes each, that won’t be an issue.
In this season’s installment, Kevin Malone (Brian Baumgartner) has run up some gambling debt, and comes up with a plan to pay them off: getting a bank loan under the guise of opening an ice-cream business. (Also known as, as fellow accountant Oscar reminds Kevin: “fraud.”) He comes up with a half-baked business plan—”Malone’s Cones,” with a flavor called “Fudge the Magic Dragon”—and goes to a loan officer. His plan lacks a bit of depth: asked what ingredients the flavor uses, he freezes, then says, “Ice cream.”
That doesn’t seem like such a funny line as typed, but imagine Baumgartner delivering it and you’ll have a sense of what I mean. So far, I’m enjoying this set—which plays like a strong B-plot from a regular-season Office episode—more than the original batch that aired in summer 2006, and a big part of the reason is that Baumgartner’s Kevin is perhaps the single Office character who can make a line funny simply by reading it. (Part of the reason that the finale subplot, in which the new HR woman assumed he was mentally retarded, worked so well.)
But I think The Office also translates into webisodes better than some other shows simply because it pretty much looks like an online series to begin with: simple sets, handheld camera and deliberately washed-out color. It doesn’t seem in any way diminished by being shrunk down online, and—and least in two-minute installments—focusing on just a few characters doesn’t feel like a cheat.
Compare that with the webisodes of Heroes, which NBC debuts next week. To be fair, I’ve only seen a cryptic trailer, which doesn’t prove one way or another whether the web series (called Going Postal) will be any good. But with almost no characters recognizable from the series and far less epic visuals, it looks less like Heroes and more like a Heroes-like substance created to fill an online obligation.
Maybe it’ll prove me wrong. But in the meantime put your money on Kevin. He needs it.