The Shadow-gloom and Weight of the Sacred

For the beginning of this rambling analysis, click here.

Season two, at 28 episodes long, brought a lot more opportunity for the writers and actors to bring depth and backstory into the show, thus easily moving away from caricature and making truly sympathetic characters. We as viewers began relating to Michael, Jim, and Pam not simply because they were caricatures of what we ourselves had experienced in the work place, we related to them because we sympathized for them. We wanted to see them win. We wanted it to some how work out for Michael despite his idiocy. We wanted to see Jim and Pam get together despite Pam's engagement to Roy. The characters of season 2 were not the same as the caricatures of season 1 (by the time the third season began we no longer held any memory of the caricatures of the first season).But, the one thing that tied together the two separate and distinctive tones of Season 1 and Season 2 of The Office was the sad, pathetic lives of the characters. It wasn't a violent shift, so in my brief treatment below, you'll notice that I combine aspects of Season 1 and Season 2.

Pam was engaged to the pig who didn't appreciate her, Roy. Jim was in love with Pam. Dwight longed for Michael's approval, but Michael treated him with superfluous indifference. Ryan was a temp working his way through business school and dating Kelly whom he finds irritating and overwhelming. Kelly is hopelessly in love, not with Ryan, but with the Hollywood ideal of being in love. She just happens to try and express that ideal through a relationship with Ryan. Kevin was a questionable accountant who was the shoddy lead singer in a shoddy Police cover band, Scrantonicity. Michael, in addition to just being Michael, desperately wanted companionship. He longed not just for friendship, but for a wife and a family. You get the point. In the second season, The Office became a show about incredibly sad these people and how they fruitlessly attempted to address the respective emptiness they each experienced in life. But it was a bloody good comedy!!!



Then came that kiss...and the scene just before the kiss when Jim actually confesses to Pam that he loves her (but for easiness's sake, I'll just call it "the kiss"). The show began to shift. Real happiness was now tenable. Prior to the kiss, the show was a collection of really sad people as they lived out their really sad situations working a really sad job--the difference between caricature and character is negligible in the broad scheme of things because the situation remained the same. Comedy was a direct result of the futility of their efforts. Happiness was not a possibility. This was a really good idea. This was really good writing. This was taking the lovable, flawed people and placing them in a world of constant existential ennui. The kiss opened up the door for all the characters to pursue happiness with a realistic expectation of attaining it.

I had a clip here of the infamous scene, but Blogger can't seem to locate it. I suspect that if you've read this, you know what I'm talking about.