W_Z wrote:
Tall Midget wrote:
I'm not sure I like the overall direction of the show because Michael is emerging more and more as the show's main victim whereas in previous season's he was a bumbling petty tyrant, an unwitting and witless oppressor. That representation of office life rings truer to me than what's happening now with his relationship stuff. Still, I do enjoy the show's fascination with all forms of American mediocrity.
greg daniels knew that michael scott could not be david brent. it just doesn't work that way here--especially if you want the show to last with american audiences. i like that michael's more bumbling and pathetic, making him more sympathetic, rather than the sexist, overbearing self aggrandizing boss that brent was.
"the office" (bbc) was great because of how short it was--there's no way you could keep that going. but using michael scott as more of a window character and broadening his storyline is a fairly clever thing, probably the only thing, they could have done.
now you have jim and michael having a bit of chemistry as well, dwight has been fleshed out a little more--the thing is they've taken caricatures and turned them into characters. that's a credit to the strong writing of the show.
i still think it's one of the best written shows on television--certainly in terms of comedies.
I don't object to broadening Michael's storyline. It's the way that it has been broadened that bothers me. He is now portrayed as a victim of his "crazy" girlfriend, a professional woman who is evidently incapable of balancing her work and personal life. Such a representation doesn't suggest a transformation of caricature into character, but exactly the reverse. Jan now amounts to nothing more than an outdated female stereotype that reigned in the 80s backlash against feminism (in popular culture, this stereotype was most famously brought to life in Meryl Streep's
Fatal Attraction character). Other female characters also amount to nothing more than a stereotype--Kelly is a domineering slut, Angela is a domineering ice queen, etc. Meanwhile, Pam apparently escapes the show's critical eye because she "knows her place" and chooses love over a career, despite her artistic aspirations. In so doing, though, she only perpetuates the stereotype that women can't have both a career
and a rewarding personal life. The male characters on the show, by contrast, are more fully realized, even if several of them--most notably Michael and Dwight--have been emasculated by their significant others.
This isn't to say that the show isn't well written. It certainly comprehends the soul-killing aspects of white collar labor better than anything else on TV. And it is quite inventive in the way that it creates bizarre yet realistic situations to express the dead-end nature of the lives its characters lead-- even if it resorts to fundamentally reactionary gender stereotypes in the process of doing so. Still, I think the show would be more interesting if it skewered the members of the corporate elite as thoroughly as it does their underlings. I would be more interested in learning about the incompetence of David Wallace than I am in learning about Jan's psychological instability.
_________________
Antonio Gramsci wrote:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
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