James Spader Joins ‘The Office’

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, July 6, 2011 at 1:46 PM - 3 Comments

Well, it’s official; of the many people The Office introduced in the season finale as a possible Steve Carell replacement (including the ones like Jim Carrey who could never in a million years join the show full-time), the new regular is the character played by James Spader, whose quirk was unnerving and manipulating everyone around him with his almost superhuman self-confidence.

Whether that quirk will carry over into most of the new season, or whether this will eventually be revealed as a mask for insecurity and weakness, we don’t know; that will be decided by the writers. Everyone on The Office is a mass of insecurities, and Michael Scott/David Brent’s behaviour came out of insecurity (about relationships with other people, his qualifications for the job, and so on), so the idea of bringing someone who is apparently not insecure about anything is kind of the obvious way to go for contrast.

Another point of contrast, as mentioned in the description, is that Spader will wind up running the whole company, promoted from Michael’s old job very quickly. This will give them the option, I suppose, of being able to play around with just what the guy’s part should be – he can be a guy who drops in sometimes, or he can be demoted back to the manager position. (It also keeps the “who will be the manager?” plot points alive.) One of the advantages of doing a show about one branch of a corporation is that they always have a built-in excuse for taking a character out of the main world and bringing him or her back again. (The best example of that, and the most daring, was sending Jim off to another branch in the opening of the third season, which was deliberately done to allow the writers to experiment with the cast chemistry and find out what they would do when Jim wasn’t around, as well as trying out new characters in Jim’s branch who could then be brought into the main cast later.) Also, it might be an inducement to a new big-name regular that he doesn’t have to do as many scenes in the main office set; that could make his schedule more flexible, whereas regular office workers like Jim, Pam and Dwight have to be there even for scenes where they don’t speak, just to show they’re at their desks.

I didn’t think he fit in particularly well with the cast in his appearance, but it’s too early to tell on that score. Still, Spader’s schtick on Boston Legal was being so weird that no one could really communicate with him except the equally crazy William Shatner character; he specialized in talking at people, not to people. It doesn’t have to be that way on The Office, but the way he’s been set up suggests a show that’s embracing the broader style it’s developed over the years. The U.S. version started with something vaguely naturalistic and inevitably got crazier, so it sort of figures that its newly-created lead is a larger-than-life character with a strange name.

My feeling is that the show had some interesting places to go without a new lead character, and that the Will Ferrell character demonstrated the dangers of having a new character who doesn’t fit in with the rest of the group. However, commercially, the regular cast probably doesn’t have a big enough name to carry the show. Whether the show needs a new star or not, this is NBC’s only hit comedy and they will need an established TV star to keep Thursday night going for at least another year. Besides, as I said, they’ve left themselves a lot of options, including not making Spader the lead if they don’t want to or if he doesn’t work out.

A post-Carell world

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 10:27 AM - 6 Comments

After a generally good season finale, I think the prospects for The Office without Steve Carell are brighter than they initially seemed. There’s a lot that could still go wrong without him, and we already saw a textbook example of what could go wrong: this was Will Ferrell’s character, who was awful and didn’t fit with the rest of the cast. But the finale showed that there is new – or at least not completely worn-out – stuff the show can do if it basically forgets Michael Scott existed and goes on as an ensemble comedy about a crazy workplace.

A lot of what the show can do now is simply give more time to the stuff that was in the background before. The biggest difference between the U.S. Office and the original, apart from (and also related to) the number of episodes, is that everyone in the office is a strong character, and everyone gets his or her own stories. The season finale gave much of its running time over to these second-tier characters and their stories, and it felt a bit like a comedic soap opera: a collection of short scenes devoted to ongoing personal problems, rather than one or two big stories that dominate Continue…

The Office: A Show With More Than Heart

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, April 29, 2011 at 12:50 AM - 5 Comments

Yeah, I got a little misty/teary/bleary at Steve Carell’s last episode of The Office as a regular. I have a respect for Greg Daniels that borders on the superstitious, but it usually pays off; I expected this episode to be good and, except for some of Will Ferrell’s scenes (we may know more about this once he’s written off the show, but it’s hard to know exactly what Ferrell’s been going for, and the tag was really not the kind of thing to convince us that the show can go on without Carell), my expectations were fulfilled. The tricky balance between Michael as he would be in real life vs. Michael the beloved sitcom character was well handled, leaning more to the escapist side of things – which is fine, since the show long ago became the story of people who find a certain refuge in the office, not people who are tormented by having to be there.

This episode also featured the best nods to the documentary conceit since the throwaway line in the third season opener (also written by Daniels) where Rashida Jones’s character made fun of Jim for his goofy looks at the camera. In addition to raising a question we ourselves had been asking since the first episode, Continue…

TV Exclusive! Something Will Happen Sometime

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, April 28, 2011 at 3:05 PM - 1 Comment

I was forwarded this “exclusive” item about the fate of Two and a Half Men post-Sheen, and found that it says… basically nothing. This is not a knock on the writers of the piece, Kim Masters and Lacey Rose, who are writing what they know and, perhaps, all anybody knows at this point. But literally all we really find out about the show is this:

Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that series co-creator Chuck Lorre has hatched an idea to reboot the Warner Bros-produced sitcom with a new creative direction that does not involve Sheen, who was fired from the series in March. Lorre is said to have presented close associates and Men co-star Jon Cryer with the plan, and the studio and network are aware of his intentions. According to an insider, Lorre has told Cryer this re-boot would involve a significant role for him and the introduction of a new, yet-to-be-cast character.

So the sources didn’t say what the plan is, merely that there is a plan to bring it back and that it will involve the current cast plus a new character to take Sheen’s place. But we all expected that even without insider information. Again, this isn’t the writers’ fault, but it does show the inherent limitations in articles based on anonymous insider sources. What we wind up knowing is either that a) the insiders won’t tell us anything and are just giving the appearance of leaking information, to get their show into the press, or b) the insiders really have no idea what’s going to happen, but want us to think they do.

Which is why the interesting information usually comes from on-the-record stuff, where the insider is authorized to talk (or, even better, isn’t authorized but goes on the record anyway; but that’s sadly rare). For example, Greg Daniels has a lot of interesting stuff to say about plans for The Office in the coming post-Carell episode; he can’t get specific about what’s going to happen either, but at least he can suggest some of the reasons behind the decisions they’ve been making. And he can get specific about stuff that’s happened in the past, which are arguably more interesting than speculation about what’s going to happen next season.

More about tonight’s Michael Scott farewell after we see it. Meanwhile, you can read Willa Paskin on the question of whether the goodwill for Steve Carell (who is genuinely beloved by viewers and colleagues) is spilling into the portrayal of the goodbye to Michael Scott (who is at best sort of grudgingly liked). The answer is probably yes, but that’s probably unavoidable. And maybe it shouldn’t even be avoided. Seinfeld‘s finale was controversial in part because it tried to be a farewell only for the characters as they exist in the world of the show – annoying people who aren’t liked by much of anyone outside their little circle – ignoring the love we had for them after watching them for such a long time. I think that was a mistake, and maybe not even a well-intentioned one.

How do you replace the show’s star?

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, March 18, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 9 Comments

CTV; GEtty Images; Photo illustration By Taylor Shute

When Charlie Sheen was fired from Two and a Half Men (for what his studio’s lawyers described as “shocking behaviour”), the world began arguing over whether the show would replace him or simply never film another episode. But in a more quiet way, other shows were already preparing to replace stars who aren’t Vatican assassins. The Office is doing a story arc that will lead to the exit of Steve Carell, who announced a year ago that he would not be renewing his contract. And the nudity-filled cable drama Spartacus: Blood and Sand recently hired a new actor to play the title role after the original star, Andy Whitfield, announced he had cancer.

Fans of a show often would prefer it to be shut down rather than see it change too much. Salon.com critic Matt Zoller Seitz implored The Office not to go on without Carell: “He is The Office, for better or worse, and anything after his departure will necessarily feel like a postscript.” But that can’t happen unless a network has something better to put in the show’s place, and The Office, Two and a Half Men and Spartacus are all among the biggest hits on their respective networks.

That means when the star is unavailable the writers will have to find a way to carry on. Most shows, unlike Spartacus, prefer not to recast the main character. The X-Files responded to David Duchovny’s departure by bringing in an actor from Terminator 2 to play a very different lead. When Valerie Harper was removed from her self-titled show Valerie, the producers killed off her character and changed the name to Valerie’s Family. Chip Keyes, one of the showrunners on Valerie, told Maclean’s that a situation like that is hardest on the writers, who have to “break stories and prep scripts that include an as yet unknown main character and actor,” and that his team had to shoot an entire episode without knowing who would star in it: “We’d shoot those scenes later and drop them in.”

Continue…

Scott Meets Brent; Brent Doesn't Mention the Documentary

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, January 28, 2011 at 12:58 PM - 0 Comments

So here’s the cold opening from last night’s The Office:

The Brent-less episode that followed was a good one, and generally I think the show has been better this year than last. Parks & Recreation, which had maybe its best episode ever last night (episodes written by Norm Hiscock are almost always good — he’s the guy who’s written for Kids in the Hall, Corner Gas, the “That’s my Purse!” episode of King of the Hill, and wrote the episodes where Parks really found itself and clicked into place), but like How I Met Your Mother, I think Office has gotten over some of the rough patches and is doing all right for a show that’s done over 100 episodes. It does seem kind of hard to believe, though, that it was once one of the least sitcom-y sitcoms on the air: as a veteran hit show where the stories and characters have been getting broader, it’s gone through a lot of sitcom tropes™ of late, so that the impending arrival of Will Ferrell as a gimmicky Special Guest Star hardly seems out of place.

TV Premiere Week: Thursday

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, September 23, 2010 at 3:11 PM - 0 Comments

And now comes one of the bigger nights of this wild premiere season — though another night that probably won’t produce a breakout hit. Except for Lone Star (where the network had to make a special announcement that they’d be showing a second episode) and last night’s The Whole Truth, there have been no out-and-out flops among the new shows. But there haven’t been any out-and-out smash hits either: NBC’s The Event was probably the best performer relative to its time slot, while Hawaii 5-0 and Mike and Molly both did well but not terrific considering their plum time slots. Most of the new shows are like that, doing OK but not great but not terrible either. Which ones stay on and which ones get canceled will depend on how they do in future weeks and what the network has waiting in the wings, plus the network executives’ opinions. (Cougar Town, for example, continues to do very poorly given its time slot, losing a huge chunk of Modern Family‘s audience. But ABC seems to like it, so they might cut loose some other show to keep it on.)

Instead, the big numbers have been posted by returning hits, particularly light n’ fun shows: Two and a Half Men, Modern Family and Glee were all up from last year.

In other ratings tidbits, the season premiere of Being Erica didn’t provide much good news: it was down to only 400,000 on an otherwise good night for the CBC. Since the network didn’t promote its return very much, I’ve heard speculation that this is seen as a possible last hurrah for the show: a chance to wrap things up without much hope of renewal. I guess we’ll see. I personally enjoy the show but have to admit that, because we’d seen her learn her lesson so often, I started to drift away a bit. There’s only so many times a character can learn the same lessons about personal growth.

Now here are tonight’s U.S. “big four” premieres, starting with the much-hyped competitive 8:00 slot:

8:00
CBS: The Big Bang Theory
NBC: Community
Fox: Bones
ABC: My Generation

I said just now that the hour is competitive, but in a sense it isn’t: The Big Bang Theory is likely to win the hour in total viewers and the Coveted Demographic. What makes it interesting is the question of how well it will do — will it get somewhere near what it got after Two and a Half Men, establishing it as a genuine smash hit? Or will some of its viewers prove unwilling to follow it to Thursday, establishing it as a bad night for CBS to try comedy? If the show can do in its new time slot what Glee did its new slot, then it will be a game-changer for its network, which would then move the aging CSI and start a two-hour Thursday comedy block to replace NBC’s. But that’s a huge “if,” which is why everyone’s going to be looking very closely at the numbers.

Then there’s Community. This show is not going to win the night; the question is whether it will hold up enough to get a third season. The quality should be as good Continue…

Why no one likes Jim anymore

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, January 14, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 24 Comments

Poor Jim Halpert on The Office: with the exception of his wife, no one likes him anymore. On the U.S. adaptation of Ricky Gervais’s show, Jim (John Krasinski) once won the hearts of fans with his conspiratorial looks at the camera and his crush on Pam (Jenna Fischer); he was the romantic character in a comedy about workplace drudgery. Fans thought this season, in which Jim and Pam finally got married, would make him even more lovable. Instead, the writers have exposed Jim as, in his own words, “a big stupid goofball,” whose defining moment this season was in an episode where he spitefully allowed someone to fall into a koi pond. Fans are starting to notice: TV.com picked Jim and Pam as two of the most annoying characters on TV, while journalist Meghan Keane wrote a widely discussed article for theawl.com, arguing that Jim is a “mediocre man who has already realized his full potential.” He was a popular character, but now Keane tells Maclean’s that only a few of her readers are ready to “stand up for Jim.”

Continue…

Jim Halpert sucks and we're just now realizing it

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, December 4, 2009 at 12:01 PM - 12 Comments

Last night’s episode of The Office was unusually depressing, because the A story was about the single worst thing Michael has ever done in his life, and the B story was about Jim turning into an idiot, easily manipulated by Dwight. I was OK with the Michael story, because it shows the real-world consequences of his tendency to treat the entire world like a bad movie scene (he always does, or says, what he would expect the hero of his unproduced screenplay to do). I do notice that now that Michael’s employees have no fear of him, the writers have to up the ante on how much trouble he can cause for people outside the office; he becomes more destructive and insane because they can no longer create the little moments of humiliation within the office setting.

But the more interesting thing, perhaps, was the way the subplot really brought home how depressing the Jim and Pam characters have become. You’d have thought their marriage would have made the show happier, but instead it’s pointed up the fact that 1) no one really likes them very much (except Michael), and 2) Having moved up the ladder at Dunder Mifflin, they’re no longer charming little people with dreams of getting out. Jim, in particular, has become a rather unappealing character, though his transformation has been going on for a long time: for about two seasons now, the writers have been dropping hints that the more Jim takes his job seriously, the closer he comes to turning into Michael.

Some links (via Myles) complaining about the depressing-ness of Jim: Linda Holmes at NPR and Meghan Keane at The Awl.

In a way, Jim has always been less of an adorable everyman character than John Krasinski, with his inherent every-guy adorability, would lead us to believe. His method of surviving his soul-crushing job was to have as little ambition as possible: wanting to succeed at his job would be admitting that it rules his life. The problem was that since he has no clear talents or interests outside the job, he’s not saving himself for any other mission in life; he’s just refusing to admit that this is what he is and what he does. And in a way, Jim is as immature and trapped in bad-movie stereotypes as Michael: in the wedding episode, where he talks about how he always knew he was destined to be together with Pam, he sounds like he’s reading the script of a bad romantic comedy where the hero’s puppy-dog determination conquers all.

The show hasn’t really explored the question of his relationship with Pam — that is, whether it’ll be any different once they’re actually forced to know each other as real people — and it will get even more depressing when/if it does. But it has shown him become more involved in his job, for reasons that are very realistic: he needs to make enough money to raise a family. But now that he has actual responsibilities that he takes seriously, he becomes not a responsible person, but a slacker pretending to be a responsible person. He only seemed to be smart because he never really tried at anything; once he starts trying, he demonstrates Homer Simpson’s adage that trying is the first step towards failure.

This doesn’t bother me much because my sympathies on the show have always gone to other characters besides Jim (because the guy with the creepy stalker obsession on a girl he barely knows anything about is not my favourite romantic-comedy character). But I can see how the more they hit the “decline and fall of Jim” button, the more depressing the show will become to the many viewers who saw Jim and Pam as the oasis of potential happiness within the bleak, insane world of the office.

Where Sitcoms And Opera Meet

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 5:05 PM - 2 Comments

This hasn’t happened since Frasier was on the air, but there was an opera-sitcom convergence last night. I don’t know who was the singer in the opera recording played on The Office (Jim played it so Dwight couldn’t hear him), but the aria was from Martha by Friederich Von Flotow, a once-popular comic opera whose big tenor aria used to be very big with tenors, both in the original German (“Ach, so fromm”) and, in the recording heard last night, in Italian (“M’ Apparì Tutto Amor”).

Here’s an audio/visual recording (a short film made in the early days of sound movies) by the star Italian tenor Tito Schipa.

When Is It OK For a Comedy To Do an Hour-Long Episode?

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, October 8, 2009 at 4:30 PM - 3 Comments

Tonight is the big Office event that we’re all looking forward to, though maybe a little tired of hearing about: the pedding of Wim and Jam wedding of Jim and Pam. It is an hour-long episode, as “event” episodes usually are. I haven’t seen the episode yet, but hour-long episodes of The Office always fill me with a bit of trepidation; as many critics have noted, the show’s structure and style isn’t really built for the hour-long format, with the result that long episodes often feel like short episodes padded out. (And the fourth season suffered in particular because of NBC’s decision to order a bunch of double-length episodes.) Not that there haven’t been good hour-long Office episodes. But like Seinfeld, another NBC show that didn’t usually hit home runs with one-hour episodes (“The Boyfriend” is the exception), it usually tells small stories and has to struggle to fill a “big” hour-long slot.

This doesn’t apply only to sitcoms; everyone who watched that show remembers the disaster that ensued when The Twilight Zone was expanded to an hour for one season. Running time is a tricky thing; a show like The Office does great when it has 30 minutes instead of 20 (like the original, and like some of the “super-sized” episodes NBC used to do), but 40 minutes is a problem, usually. And let’s not even get into the series finale thing: it’s generally understood that a sitcom will often have better artistic results with its series finale if it sticks to the half-hour length, the way Mary Tyler Moore and Newhart did, rather than doing a bloated, over-long, night-busting finale like Seinfeld or M*A*S*H did (I said “artistic” results, not “ratings” results; M*A*S*H got great ratings for the finale, but a half-hour version would have been a better episode).

However, the wedding may be a big enough story to make the double-length format work for The Office tonight. Which leads me, finally, to the question I brought up in the subject heading: when does it work for a half-hour show to expand to an hour-long story? What are some double-length episodes that work, and is there anything they have in common that makes them work? Of course the reason for doing an hour-long episode is that the network wants one. But what are some non-crass reasons for doing an hour-long show?

(I should add that not all two-parters are true hour-long stories. Sometimes a two-part episode really consists of two completely separate stories, both of which follow the typical half-hour structure, but have something connecting them. You’ve seen them, and they go like this: Week 1, the story seems to be finished, but there’s a twist that results in a “To Be Continued” cliffhanger. Week, 2, we get a story that follows up on the events at the end of Week 1. But the episodes are both separate entities. An example is King of the Hill‘s two-parter that spanned the third and fourth seasons. Part 1 was about Peggy and Hank feeling depressed on their anniversary, and ended with them working off their depression by going skydiving, only for Peggy to plummet to her apparent demise. Part 2 was about Peggy recovering from her near-fatal accident; the episode touched on some issues raised in the first episode, but it was a separate episode with separate writers and its own self-contained story.)

The obvious reason for doing a double-length story is that there’s a story that’s just too big to fit into 20+ minutes. I don’t know how many of those there are, though, since most stories that are appropriate for a sitcom are appropriate for a half-hour format. (Same with your Twilight Zone type of story, a short story with a surprise ending: if you’re not pitching a small story that can lead to a big twist, then why are you pitching it to The Twilight Zone instead of some other show?) That probably happens most often if the story for the episode contains elements of some other genre, like mystery, that usually requires more time to get the plot worked out. The Simpsons, which almost never does two-parters, did one for “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” and it had to be a two-parter, mostly because of the audience-participation gimmick, but because it needed the whole first half-hour to plant all the clues. (And even then, the second half feels heavily padded.) South Park does this sometimes, where they’ll expand to two parts simply because they get to the end of part one and realize they’re not finished yet.

Another reason for doing an extra-long episode is that something extra gets added during the writing or rehearsals, and an expanded length is the only way to incorporate the new material without killing the story. This has happened a few times. What started as a half-hour script for WKRP got expanded to a double-length episode when the guest actor started throwing in a bunch of improvised scenes with Howard Hesseman (they had been in the comedy troupe The Committee together), and the showrunner decided that they should expand their scenes together. So it became a basically small story, but with every scene running longer than usual.

And with the Keith Hernandez episode of Seinfeld, the need to showcase the guest star and give him a bigger-than-usual role for guest characters meant that if it had been a half-hour, they’d have had to cut down the other two stories pretty severely. As an hour, it may feel a little padded (though it’s one of my favourite episodes from my favourite Seinfeld season), but at least the Vandelay Industries and “spitter” stories can get all the time they need.

One show that had an interesting and fairly unique approach to the double-length episode was Taxi: every season they would do a special two-part episode that consisted of solo vignettes for each of the main characters, connected by a framing sequence where they’d tell stories about their lives (their experiences in a particular cab, the jobs they got while laid off from taxi driving, etc). The episodes weren’t separate from each other, but they didn’t have an hour’s worth of plot; they were patterned after two-part clip shows that some sitcoms would do, except all the clips were new.

Taking The Fun Out of Dysfunction

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, September 17, 2009 at 11:37 PM - 3 Comments

I didn’t like the pilot of Community as much as most people did (though it is, after all, only a pilot). I found something a little hacky about a lot of the joke writing, with lots of rhythms, joke constructions and characters that have become clichés of the “edgy” comedy: the guy who compares everything to popular movies, the politically-incorrect old guy, the laundry lists of dysfunctions and bad behaviour. (I was really hoping they would not have that character make the obvious reply after someone mentioned “Aspergers,” but yes: “Heh-heh-heh… assburgers.” Seriously, it’s not clever or edgy if we see it coming.) The last scene, where the characters show at least some potential to function as an ensemble, was promising, though, but I feel like the weakest things about it are the cynical/dysfunctional bits, and it works best when it’s closer to a regular ensemble comedy about more or less normal people trying to make it. But with the Joel McHale character at the centre, it’s going to have trouble playing to that strength.

One of the things that makes The Office unusually successful and durable for an edgy-comedy franchise is, I think, that Ricky Gervais and Ian Stephen Merchant deliberately didn’t play up the dysfunctions of the characters. Even David Brent is dysfunctional in a realistic way, the guy who thinks he’s funny and beloved but isn’t. Most of the other characters on that show were as mundane as the lives they led. The American version has become broader and turned at least one character, Dwight, into a full-blown cartoon character — but it still has its roots in the idea that most of these people are not unrecognizably weird or dysfunctional. Which seems to be the right mix for comedy: characters who range from fully sane, to people who are crazy but in a realistic way, to one or two out-and-out cartoons (your Kramers, Barneys, Sheldons, Jim Ignatowski-ses). This probably is too generalized a pronouncement, but I think one reason single-camera shows have trouble catching on is their tendency to define almost every character by their dysfunctionality. The paradoxical thing is that characters sometimes have more potential to become funny if they start with relatively common, everyday characteristics, as long as those characteristics are well-defined. (“The hard-drinking, crusty boss” or “the know-it-all barfly” are decent ways to start with a character. “The fast-talking guy who compares everything to The Breakfast Club or Meatballs,” I don’t know about.)

I enjoyed The Office premiere a lot (I missed the Parks and Recreation premiere, but will try and catch up with it and see if that show is making the expected second-season improvement). Paul Lieberstein, who wrote and directed the premiere and is in charge of the show while Greg Daniels and Michael Schur are busy with Parks, has always been good at light comedy based on dark subjects, which can then take an unexpected dip into genuine darkness (but one that, because the episode deals with adultery, we’ve been properly set up for). It’s surprising, though, how much the show has abandoned the idea of David/Michael unwittingly abusing his power. The original idea was that the boss is terrorizing, manipulating and pulling incredibly cruel jokes on his employees, and they have to sit there and take it because he’s the boss. But this episode, with the story about the intern program, had all kinds of opportunities for that type of joke, and the script did not take them. Instead the episode wound up with Michael being scared of his employees, rather than the other way around. The inherent cruelty of the premise occasionally comes out on the show, but it’s become a much gentler show as Michael has become more of a sympathetic (if exasperating) character.

Comedy Tonight — Which Is To Say, Comedy Last Night

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, May 15, 2009 at 1:20 PM - 1 Comment

Some Friday comedy thoughts:

- The excellent season finale of The Office didn’t have a tag (a scene before the closing credits but after the final commercial break), which was a bit disconcerting. I actually prefer the show without the tags, but I’m so used to them that I simply didn’t expect the show to be over after Pam’s Big Revelation™; I was not mentally prepared to think that that was the end. That’s why I think it helps a show to have the executive producer credit at the end, the way 30 Rock does: when you see Lorne Michaels’ credit, you know the episode is over.

- I’m still not into Parks and Recreation but the sixth episode was the best yet, and the presence of writer Norm Hiscock on the show is a good sign. (Hiscock, formerly head writer for Kids in the Hall, was hired by Greg Daniels to write many episodes of King of the Hill; after he left that show, he moved back to Canada and wrote for Corner Gas among others. I guess Daniels lured him back.) There are reviews from Televisionary and (more positively) from Myles; both agree in their own ways that the documentary format, uneasily grafted onto this show, may be holding it back. (It may be a little cursed by the fact that it grew out of NBC’s desire for an Office spinoff.)

- One advantage of 30 Rock‘s single-camera setup and cartoonish style is that it allows the writers to get away with using some of the oldest sitcom plots on record. Last night’s episode had Continue…

Quick Thoughts On NBC Comedies

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, May 8, 2009 at 10:25 AM - 5 Comments

- 30 Rock really seems to have gone all the way over to making Liz the crazy person and Jack the straight man. Earlier this season I felt like they were alternating, but now I feel like Jack is the most “normal” member of the group, reacting to Liz’s insanity (“Why don’t I have any other friends?”). Last night all three stories revolved in some way around Liz being insane, screwing up, embarrassing herself, or being unable to distinguish between life and the movies. She has become the early Michael Scott, even as Michael Scott himself has become more sympathetic.

- Parks and Recreation isn’t too good so far, though NBC has already picked it up for another season and it might improve by then. I wonder if it looks worse because The Office has gotten sweeter and nicer this season? There’s still plenty of pain on The Office (it is, after all, being run by Paul Lieberstein, who specializes in the comedy of pain), but over the years the characters have grown to like each other more, and we’ve grown to like them more, to the point that an episode can end with everybody dancing and enjoying themselves and it doesn’t seem out of character. P&R is trying to be more about the pain and boredom of everyday work life, but instead of coming off as a cousin of The Office, it comes off as a very different show despite the similar format.

- My Name Is Earl does too many gimmick episodes. That’s not even a thought, just a truism.

Random Thoughts On Upcoming Episodes I Haven't Seen Yet

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, January 30, 2009 at 10:37 PM - 0 Comments

Just some thoughts that come to mind while browsing next week’s TV listings at the invaluable Futon Critic:

- The Futon Critic himself has a review of the post-Super-Bowl The Office episode.

- I still don’t get why Lie To Me feels a need to have two mysteries per episode. (This episode is a replacement for the actual third episode, which got delayed, and which also has two mysteries.) They’re just going to double the risk of running out of plausible mysteries, all the while jamming every episode so full of mystery-solving that there’s no time for character moments. House may be formulaic, but the “meanwhile” from its upcoming 100th episode is a character-based subplot, not a slightly lighter version of the main mystery.

- What does Damages have in common with Two and a Half Men? They both title every episode after a line of dialogue from the episode that only makes sense when you hear it in context. (Damages‘ next episode is called “I Agree, It Wasn’t Funny”; Men‘s next episode is called “David Copperfield Slipped Me a Roofie.”)

- Speaking of Two and a Half Men, next time you watch one of Chuck Lorre’s shows, note that his shows use writing credits differently from almost any other prime-time show. Every episode of his two shows has both a “story by” and “teleplay by” credit (except for the pilots) distributed among different members of the writing staff. Apparently Lorre decided to more or less eliminate the first draft and the corresponding “written by” credit; the episodes are almost entirely written in the room, and then the episode assigns story and teleplay credit (and therefore royalties) to several writers. NewsRadio used that system too in some of its episodes, but not all.

- I know Knight Rider is going to be canceled and deserves to be, but plot descriptions like next week’s make me wish that they’d done the retool (dropping the terrorist-fighting stuff and getting back to cheesy ’80s-style stories) earlier. This story, you’ve got to admit, is a real Knight Rider story in every way:

Mike’s old Army friend recruits his help to investigate the suspicious death of a tough-as-nails drill sergeant Jack Burber. Mike learns that the drill sergeant was participating in an underground fight club for military veterans for extra money. In order to find out what really happened, Mike has to infiltrate the fight club and try not to get himself killed in the ring.

Why couldn’t they have done stories like that in the first place? Then they might actually have become a (cheesy but entertaining) success.

- I look forward to any How I Met Your Mother episode that offers the opportunity for more Canada jokes.

THE OFFICE Is Going To Winnipeg! (Sort Of)

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, October 24, 2008 at 1:46 PM - 1 Comment

Well, they’re not really going to Winnipeg, but Winnipeg props are coming to them for an upcoming episode where Michael Scott visits the birthplace of Anna Paquin, Guy Maddin and Less Than Kind.

I hope Global doesn’t try to hype it too much; they should have learned their lesson from their infamous publicity campaign for a 2002 episode of The Simpsons called “The Bart Wants What It Wants.” In that episode, a couple of Canadian writers wrote in a scene where the Simpsons go to Toronto, and Global hyped the hell out of that episode literally for weeks — you could not avoid hearing or reading about how “The Simpsons are going to Toronto!” Then the episode aired and the Toronto stuff turned out to consist of a few throwaway gags in the third act, and viewers were highly P.O.’d at Global for telling us that this was going to be some kind of special Canadian episode.

THE OFFICE Conference Call In Which I Didn't Ask Questions And Which Therefore Doesn't Count

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, September 8, 2008 at 4:43 PM - 0 Comments

NBC sponsored a conference call today with Amy Ryan (The Wire), who was added to The Office at the end of last season, and Paul Lieberstein, who plays Toby but mainly is a writer-producer and sometimes director on the show. They ran out of time before I could get to ask a question, which of course would have been the most probing question in the history of journalism.

I haven’t been on a whole lot of conference calls, and one thing that always surprises me is how many of the questions are essentially ‘shipper questions — who’s going to get together with who, does X have a chance with Y, etc. In this case, everybody seemed to want to know if Amy Ryan’s character is going to get together with Michael. Which I suppose provides a change of pace from the usual Jim/Pam questions.

The three most interesting comments, by Lieberstein, were:

Continue…