Brief takes on The Office and 30 Rock coming up after the jump:
Because of an encroaching magazine deadline, I probably shouldn’t even be writing this, but quickly—I thought last night’s Office A-plot did an excellent job of combining comedy and pathos, giving an emotional payoff to the love-triangle plot that I wasn’t always certain about. For starters: Andy running over Dwight with his Prius was one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while (“The Prius is silent if he keeps it under 5 mph”). Much credit goes to Ed Helms, who took a character who was originally a buffoon—OK, still is—and making him a sympathetic and well-realized person.
But the beauty of the episode was that the whole arc of the showdown—from Andy and Dwight ganging up against Jim to make sure they got their fight, to their joint rejection of Angela over their respective betrayals—is how it showed us that, as different as their backgrounds and circumstances are, in many ways Andy and Dwight are very similar (obsessive, competitive, needy) people. I’ll be interest now to see how Angela, whom Angela Martin has also done a great job humanizing, takes to the dual rejection.
As for the B plot, it, like Michael’s answer to David Wallace, seemed to go on and on without ever getting anywhere. And it seemed a little out of character for Michael not to be able to explain his branch’s success, since one constant of his, as we’ve seen in countless of his documentary interviews, is that he’s never at a loss for a cockamamie theory of life or management. Why would the cat suddenly have gotten his tongue?
30 Rock was especially weak—the Salma Hayek storyline can’t end soon enough for me. One thing that struck me: ”My grandfather dug out the White Haven quarry and my other grandfather filled it back in with the sludge from the eraser factory” seemed, for some reason, an especially Simpsons-esque line. Is Liz Lemon Lisa Simpson all grown up, but with less healthy eating habits?
