Season One, which premiered in the spring of 2005 and consisted of only six episodes, tried to replicate the tone of the British series of the same name that inspired it. Just as reality television soothes a viewer's inner narcissist by telling stories of even more pronounced narcissists wreaking havoc on their surroundings, The Office made its audience feel better about their professional lives by showcasing a workplace with even drabber décor and more grating coworkers.Ī Moral Crisis for Community Fans: Should We Keep Watching This Show? Like their dead-end jobs and the dead-end lives that inevitably spring from such jobs, these people were just passing time, one prolonged meeting at a time.
Set in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in the sales office of a nearly obsolete paper company, the show's characters at first didn't develop as much as stagnate. The gambit worked brilliantly, and proved that a weekly television show could be the perfect medium to tell stories about contemporary work culture-for a while. NBC's mockumentary sitcom, which concludes its ninth and final season on Thursday, flipped the TV-as-a-distraction-from-real-life paradigm by setting the action in precisely the type of workplace many people long to escape. Unless, of course, that TV show is The Office.
After all, what better way to take your mind off of the job you left just a few hours earlier than by watching a TV show? There isn't a more quintessentially American form of relaxation than resting your feet on a coffee table after a long day at work and turning on the tube.
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