Watching The Office

After Thursday’s episode or The Office I’ve been thinking extremely hard to figure out why The Office is so good. I’ve come up with five reasons why The Office has become the funniest show on television bar-none.

1. Actors/Characters—Somehow with a limited first season run (only six episodes) The Office was able to acquire an ensemble cast. Steve Carell, Rainn Wilson, and John Krasinski just to name a few. All the actors have great chemistry. They play off each other so well. Steve plays off of anyone. Steve is very much the mainstay of the show.

Going along with Actors, the characters that have been created for The Office are so widely diverse, some are even completely insane (Creed, Dwight, and Meredith). But, great characters always makes for great story telling, that’s a give-in.

2. The Writing—B.J. Novak (Ryan), Mindy Kaling (Kelly), and the rest of the writing crew have done a phenomenal job. I’m not sure how they keep The Office being consistently funny every week. The way they’ve blended all the romances together into the comedy is brilliant. Their comedic timing is impeccable. It just seems that they know exactly what they are doing. They know the characters so intimately that every episode is a joy to watch.

Writing truly is the lifeblood of any television show. You can have everything else going for you, but if your writing sucks, you’re thrown out with the rest of the cancelled TV trash.

3. Mixing Drama & Comedy—This is where I think The Office is leaps and strides ahead of anything else on TV. The Office has been able to mix drama and comedy flawlessly. Who would’ve thought that a comedy as funny as The Office is, would’ve had so many touching moments. Like last year Jim kissing Pam.

I try to think back on all the comedies I’ve loved over the years and I can’t think of one that has really been able to mix these two as effectively as The Office has. The Office really has an advantage when people are coming back to watch the show each week because of two things. They want to laugh, and they want to truly find out what happens with Pam and Jim.

4. The Background Characters Slowly Moving to the Forefront—Another thing that The Office has done well is how smoothly it’s transitioned the background characters into full-fledged characters that we know and care about. They’ve done this by not shoving them in our faces and ‘making’ us love them. A little Creed here, a little Meredith there. Some weird laughing noises from Kevin, and an occasional glare from Angela, have all helped us to know who these characters are.

I think that the small time that Creed has on screen is priceless. Every time he says something he just becomes ever more strange. But, he cracks me up all the time. I’m glad they’ve shied away from doing episodes specifically about these back ground characters until now. Diwali was about Kelly, but even then she was still a back ground character of sorts. The point is we’ve come to love them on our own terms. We haven’t been forced to accept them. They’ve always been there, and it’s just taking some time to bring them all into our line of view.

5. The “Mockumentary� Style of Shooting—I think that the interviews add more to this show than anything else. Some of the interviews are the funniest parts of the show. Also, the fact that the actors are allowed, and probably encouraged (as Dwight does often) to look at the camera. It makes the show feel like it’s improvised. I love the way they decided to shoot it. I’ve got to give all the credit to Ricky Gervais for doing the British version like that so we could in turn copy it.

I think that The Office is growing faster than anyone imagined. NBC has recognized that it’s a fan favorite. Even in the face of poor ratings NBC has helped it along. It’s great to see a network get behind it’s show (unlike what FOX did to Arrested Development).

I’m hoping for many more seasons of Dunder Mifflin. Here’s to continued success…

The Office, Steve Carell, Comedy, NBC, Drama