I need to explain the background of this one first. Other than the news and an occasional football game, our family has not really been a big teevee watching family. As a result, my ignorance of the world of sitcoms is nearly perfect, which led to the obvious conclusion — I need to blog about this.
Actually, there is a little more to it than that. Because of technoLOGical advances in recent times, it is possible to watch shows without having to mess with television schedules and such. And after I heard some of my kids talking about The Office in positive ways, Nancy and I started watching the American version of the show on my laptop, usually an episode a night — although we did watch a bunch in a row when we got stranded in an airport recently. Anyhow, we are now caught up, and have watched through the eighth episode of the fourth season. And the experience made me want to say something.
My main point concerns morality as it is generally portrayed in the series. However, before getting to that let me get one important thing out of the way. There were two or three episodes out of the whole batch which were just plain stupid tacky, and nothing more to say about it. Who needed that? But a lot of Christians would probably say this about the whole series, and this is the point I wanted to write about.
This branch office of Dunder Mifflin is crammed full of misfits, with some kind of normality being resident in two of the characters (Jim and Pam). The others all have issues of varying levels of radioactivity — Angela is a fusser, Dwight is a control freakazoid, Michael is an endearing kind of pathetic, Creed is a thief, Oscar is a homosexual, Meredith is a promiscuous alcoholic, Ryan is a climber, Kelly is a major league aimless chatterer, and Kevin has a porn problem. What’s that again? That’s entertainment!
Actually, it is a very effective series of morality plays. And the morality (with a few exceptions) lines up with a biblical way of story-telling, and is done very effectively. First, despite all the Foibles, the characters are not presented in a way that makes us hate and despise them, period. In large part, this is done with the cut-away interview segments, which closes the rhetorical distance between each character and the audience. Many things are gradually revealed which let us know how they got that way — especially Michael. At the same time, the problems are shown in painfully funny ways without flinching, and they are shown as real problems. The longer you watch the series, the more clearly you see the problems, the more attached you are to the characters, and by the end of the day, the last person you want to be like is that character. Or that one. Or that one. And it is not done by making the problem person a two-dimensional melodramatic problem.
Sin is not tarted up in the way that so effectively snookers street-wise teenagers everywhere, and neither is the sin assailed in that ineffective preachy way known to eye-rolling teenagers everywhere, who should have been rolling their eyes at the former tarter-uppers, so to speak, but who weren’t.
At any rate, warts and all, The Office is good stuff. But you have to look at the warts right.