Friday, April 01, 2005
Meant to post this yesterday, but got caught up with work, baseball, and Mitch
I watched the latest episode of The Office on Wednesday afternoon. I had to tape it because of the Crooked Fingers concert. Although it was better than the off-putting, bizarro-world adaptation of the first episode, I still can’t tell if I really like the show or not. The first two thirds were awkward, but not just in the intentional way that we should expect. They were, well, awkward in their awkwardness, in part due to the relatively poor acting of Steve Carell and Rainn Wilson. I don’t have any problems with characters deviating from the originals, but thus far neither Michael Scott nor Dwight Schrute seem like real people to me. Both Carell and Wilson seem fake, like sitcom actors. Their respective social ignorance is less plausible than that of their British counterparts. As hopeless and out-of-touch as David Brent and Gareth Keenan could be, they still both possessed a believable humanity, and rarely devolved into cartoons or standard television characters. Thus far, Michael Scott pretty much is a cartoon, though, and a completely unlikable one at that. Carell is still funny, at times, but more than anybody else he highlights this version’s lack of the subtlety that helped define the original. Many people have pointed out that thus far Scott doesn’t have David Brent’s desperation, his pathetic need to be loved and respected that we see in the first season of The Office. That is very true, and without those humanizing qualities Michael Scott can’t be the center of a successful show. The original is so great, in part, because nothing about it feels like a standard sitcom. The American version tries to recreate that atmosphere, but fails, and mostly because Steve Carell plays Michael Scott like a normal sitcom character. Thus far Scott has less in common with David Brent than with Phil Hartman’s fantastic Bill McNeal, a character whose misanthropy and cynicism was leavened by Newsradio’s lightly absurdist tone. In The Office’s cinema verite framework, the same qualities in Scott are mostly off-putting. Michael Scott thus undermines The Office’s very nature twice over, once by coming off too much like a sitcom character, and again by being so unlikable that the show’s squirm-inducing comedy is more painful than funny. At any rate, he’s a poor copy of David Brent, the Guero to Gervais’s Odelay.
(I just put that last sentence in there to appeal to blogger types. I haven't even heard that new Beck album.)
I watched the latest episode of The Office on Wednesday afternoon. I had to tape it because of the Crooked Fingers concert. Although it was better than the off-putting, bizarro-world adaptation of the first episode, I still can’t tell if I really like the show or not. The first two thirds were awkward, but not just in the intentional way that we should expect. They were, well, awkward in their awkwardness, in part due to the relatively poor acting of Steve Carell and Rainn Wilson. I don’t have any problems with characters deviating from the originals, but thus far neither Michael Scott nor Dwight Schrute seem like real people to me. Both Carell and Wilson seem fake, like sitcom actors. Their respective social ignorance is less plausible than that of their British counterparts. As hopeless and out-of-touch as David Brent and Gareth Keenan could be, they still both possessed a believable humanity, and rarely devolved into cartoons or standard television characters. Thus far, Michael Scott pretty much is a cartoon, though, and a completely unlikable one at that. Carell is still funny, at times, but more than anybody else he highlights this version’s lack of the subtlety that helped define the original. Many people have pointed out that thus far Scott doesn’t have David Brent’s desperation, his pathetic need to be loved and respected that we see in the first season of The Office. That is very true, and without those humanizing qualities Michael Scott can’t be the center of a successful show. The original is so great, in part, because nothing about it feels like a standard sitcom. The American version tries to recreate that atmosphere, but fails, and mostly because Steve Carell plays Michael Scott like a normal sitcom character. Thus far Scott has less in common with David Brent than with Phil Hartman’s fantastic Bill McNeal, a character whose misanthropy and cynicism was leavened by Newsradio’s lightly absurdist tone. In The Office’s cinema verite framework, the same qualities in Scott are mostly off-putting. Michael Scott thus undermines The Office’s very nature twice over, once by coming off too much like a sitcom character, and again by being so unlikable that the show’s squirm-inducing comedy is more painful than funny. At any rate, he’s a poor copy of David Brent, the Guero to Gervais’s Odelay.
(I just put that last sentence in there to appeal to blogger types. I haven't even heard that new Beck album.)
