Season Finale Season: The Office
Jim and Pam, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. SPOILER! Jim kissed Pam at the end of the season 2 finale which aired last Thursday. I hope I didn’t ruin it for anyone. If I did, I’m sorry, but you should be more on the ball with your DVR watching. Seriously. It’s your own damn fault. You don’t deserve surprises. I’m sorry.
So, it’s mid-May and sweeps in full bloom. A handful of shows have aired the last episode of their respective seasons, giving TV addicts some necessary time off (or at least giving them extra time to, say, watch the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica). It’s an important part of the television calendar not only for the networks who need the ratings points to drive up their ad-dollars, but for the viewer as well, who needs some sort of validation in spending the past 30 weeks following a story that’s suppose to go somewhere. Season finale season is the literal (and figurative) payoff for both sides.
So far, The Office has delivered the best episode. It had the perfect balance of soapy-cliffhanger and genuine hilarity. This speaks volumes about a show that one year ago I thought would do nothing but stain the image of the original BBC The Office (my favorite televison comedy of all time). But that wasn’t the case. The American version retooled over the summer and came back strong. The fact that it’s actually built an audience is even more impressive as the retooling was in no way a watering down. Now, The Office is in the unenviable position of being THE comedy that could resurrect the entire genre (the irony that it could also save NBC, the network who more or less killed television comedy over the past seven years by beating a dead horse with a dead panda is priceless). Next season will be key as the series needs to maintain the level of writing it’s currently putting on the air as well as adding viewers. Here’s hoping The Office cracks the top 20 and unseats Two and a Half Men as the number one comedy in America (it has been for over a year!!!).
What’s interesting about the growing audience for The Office is the show represents exactly what network suits say will not work on television: single-camera comedy with no laugh track (and in the case of The Office no music track either… just silence). And yet people don’t seemed to be frightened off and running back into the wilderness.
The Office, NBC Thursdays 9:30et
Tags: NBC, Season Finale, The Office
