“The Office” — Dunder Mifflin Infinity
OK, I’m really short on time (and sleep) and thus am going to do my best to break down this week’s The Office focusing on two key points… right after the break.
First of all, I felt “Dunder Mifflin Infinity” did a better job of using the hour format than “Fun Run” did last week. Perhaps this is because “Fun Run” had to establish the season and then try to tell a story. This week things were far more focused. In fact, having an entire hour to work with ultimately came to the episode’s advantage (if not in laughs, then certainly in character and drama). I guess that’s the big difference between a thirty-minute episode of The Office and an hour-long episode. Once you start working with that extra 22 minutes you’re technically in “drama” territory. This doesn’t bother me because the characters are rounded enough to handle that extra leg work. Then, indirectly, you suddenly start building toward conceptual comedic climaxes… not just jokes.
This brings me to the second point I wanted to hit. The culmination of Michael’s fear of technology (and more specifically becoming replaced), the futile embrace of gift-basket-based customer service and a really stubborn GPS device in a rental car ended up in what might be the single greatest moment in the history of the series: Michael driving his car (with Dwight riding shotgun) right into a lake. It wasn’t just that he listened to a computer’s suggestion over what he was seeing with his own eyes, and it wasn’t only Dwight’s panicked shouts from the passenger seat, but had a lot to do with the fact that the scene (shot from the back seat of the flooding car) was done live and in one take. We see the car drive into the drink. We see Dwight crawl out the window. We see Michael open his door to rushing water, and we see the two of them, one feigning heroics and the other completely dumbfounded as to what had just happened, drift along the sides of the car working their way back to land. All of this happened without the camera cutting away. I laughed so hard when I saw this I think I might have peed a little.
At the end of the British Office, we see David Brent have an actual emotional breakdown. The US version can’t do this because it’s expected to run for half a decade, though these frequent displays of physical breakdown (here with the car, last week at the Fun Run) seem to serve the same purpose, though easier to repeat.
I still worry about this month of hour-long episodes and how they will compare to the 22 half-hours that will follow later in the year, but for the time being there really isn’t any reason to start panicking just yet.
