What is your review of The Office (U.S. TV series)?
08.06.2025 20:59
It’s as if the Schrutes are some weird, inbred, Lovecraftian clan, and Dwight has a mutant brother who dwells beneath the beets.
But in the meantime, Jim becomes Dwight’s best man, and Dwight refers to Pam as his ‘best friend’. And it’s true that Dwight is one of the few male characters in the show who never professes any romantic or sexual interest in Pam—which makes sense if you think of them as, symbolically, brother and sister. (He does once talk with characteristically brutal frankness about how she’s not as attractive as she was before she had children, but he never seems to be attracted to her.)
He asks the staff if they want to watch the rest of it. They say that they do. He puts it on again.
What is your review of working in EY?
I think it’s significant that, in the Finale, Michael—who, for the first time, barely even acknowledges the camera—has only two lines:
This is only the beginning of Jan’s character development. Dunderpedia notes that her original name, Jan Levinson-Gould, seems to have the surnames of two of the psychologists most associated with the concept of the midlife crisis, Daniel Levinson and Roger Gould, although they add ‘this is probably just a coincidence’.
Whenever Phyllis behaves like an ordinary middle-aged woman with ordinary needs, Michael is squicked out. (There’s one moment early on where she does an expert dancer’s shimmy, and Michael practically runs out of the room; in her youth, Phyllis Smith was a burlesque performer.) Remember Phyllis’ wedding, where Michael behaved as though he were simultaneously her father and her son? Running around wanting attention, yet also presuming to take charge of proceedings?
Michael treats Phyllis as if she is the office’s resident elderly woman, although, as Phyllis points out, they were in high school together.
Pam prepares them for it by reminding them that the last time he screened an unfinished version of it, they all laughed and he got mortally offended. She urges them not to laugh this time, and for most of the first half of the screening, the staff manage to keep a respectful silence.
That is what goes away when he’s around Holly.
If Jim is the golden boy, Dwight is the Tin Man. He thinks he’s on a quest, which is to do awesome things in life, like be a karate expert, or a supervillain: actually, he just needs to grow a heart.
In ‘Last Day in Florida’, a quiet hint from Robert California warns Jim that, if Dwight claims credit for the Sabre store, he will get fired because Robert was never interested in the store. Jim physically tackles Dwight to the ground, warning him not to make the presentation, and stalls Dwight for long enough that Nellie has Packer do it—whereupon Packer gets canned, which Dwight sees.
In the last moments of the show, she pulls the second-bravest stunt of her life: she sells their house, so that they can move to Austin and Jim can have his ideal job.
Have you ever been forced to undress for money just once?
However, by the end, he is in a happy and secure marriage with someone who loves him, and indeed they have children, of whom he is so proud that he owns two phones, just to hold all the pictures of them. (This was before cloud storage really took off.)
Holly is, quite possibly, the nicest person in the show.
When they meet the client, Jan tries to talk business but Michael insists on making small talk and ordering food and drinks. What was supposed to be a lunch meeting goes on until late in the evening, and by the end of it, Christian has come to like Michael so much that he’s persuaded by Michael that Dunder Mifflin’s customer service justifies the extra cost. Jan is so impressed that she kisses Michael in the parking lot.
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A chastened Dwight silently extends his hand to Jim and helps him up off the floor.
I would insert a picture of Melora Hardin as Jan, here, but one of the interesting things about Jan, which makes her unlike Jim, or David Wallace, or Todd Packer, is that no one picture can be said to show what Jan looks like. This is because Jan’s role changes so much.
The childish word ‘sucky’ reminds us of the little boy Michael who we saw in a clip from an old TV show in season 2, telling a puppet that his dream was to get married and have one hundred kids, so I can have one hundred friends, and no one can say ‘no’ to being my friend.
Michael: I have my book on business, Somehow I Manage. I have my HBO comedy special, Here I Go Again… But you know what? When I think about it, when I really think about it, none of those things are as real to me as my movie.
Jim: Huh.
But she has got to him. Because, before, he would never have sincerely apologised to someone he was in the middle of a fight with.
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But the whole point of that episode is that Michael spends it completely failing to realise that his employees are not him. He can’t perceive boundaries.
why the American version continues after Michael Scott leaves;
‘Dinner Party’ is, among other things, a masterclass in tight-lipped smiling.
It’s also about the development of Dwight’s.
Michael: That was a really sucky thing to do.
But Dwight, at least in the first two seasons, is his loyal lieutenant.
why the UK version is only two seasons long;
In fact, I’ll go further: she is, in terms of the spiritual epic that I maintain lies beneath this whole show, the missing half of Michael.
The attention-needing Michael of seasons 1–3 couldn’t possibly have left the show. But in ‘Goodbye Michael’, he leaves the office a day earlier than he told everyone he would, because all he wants is to be with Holly and he doesn’t want big goodbyes.
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Holly: [deadpan] Not worried about that.
He starts laughing. Because it’s hilariously bad, and he can see that now.
Because, as everyone who’s watched this show knows, Holly is in many ways a female version of Michael.
I think, however, that this theory helps to explain why some people, like me, consider the US version of the show to be be superior to the UK version. I’ve heard the US version dismissed as a ‘soap opera’, or as somehow lacking the edge of the UK version. I disagree; the UK version never got anything like as intimately nasty as ‘Dinner Party’. I think the US version is a much more ambitious and much more successful piece of entertainment.
Michael is still clinging to the illusion that ‘Threat Level Midnight’ has a future outside of this office, and that it’s more than something where you get together with all your friends and just have fun and don’t care about how it turns out.
However, three episodes later, in ‘Survivor Man’, Michael becomes annoyed that Ryan did not invite him on a survival weekend.
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At the end of season 5 ep 7’s ‘Business Trip’, his sudden question to David Wallace is as real and as honest and as authentically sorrowful as Michael ever gets:
Now, I’m sure that this will hardly come as a surprise.
Holly: [smiling] Yeah, I know what you mean. I nearly fell asleep when he gave me a tour of the files.
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Michael: Yep. Well, Pam is cute.
My theory about the US version of The Office is that it works, on one level, as a spiritual epic about the development of personhood from infancy to maturity.
Throughout the episode, Michael behaves like a mini-Packer, randomly thumping Creed on the arm and then getting Dwight to join him in a ‘raid’ on the accounting department. It’s Michael living up to the idea of cool that Packer represents to him, even though it amounts to no more than random assholism.
In the UK version, Dawn learned the self-confidence to dump Lee and find Tim. Gareth became a semi-decent manager. And David Brent met a woman who liked him, and finally acquired the balls to tell Chris Finch to fuck off—my favourite moment in the UK version. Perhaps only Tim didn’t grow, but only because he started out relatively mature.
Michael’s growth accelerates dramatically as soon as he’s met her.
(In a nice touch, Jim steals Hunter’s CD, as a sort of punishment for the surrogate parents’ dreadful dinner party, and he and Pam enjoy it while contentedly munching burgers in their car, later that evening.)
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Packer’s resemblance to an infant, and the threat he represents to Michael ever achieving maturity, is first shown in season 2’s ‘The Carpet’, where Michael discovers that something foul-smelling (it’s implied to be human faeces) has been left on his office carpet. He is disgusted by this and is plunged into depression as to who in the office would do something so horrible to him—until Packer gleefully informs him that he, Packer, did it, whereupon Michael declares it hilarious.
Michael: That's what she said.
He gets up and goes out to her.
He is intercepted by Pam, and they share a silent goodbye (this shot was Jenna Fischer and Steve Carell actually saying goodbye, on Carell’s last day.)
I’d compare it to the great moment towards the end of Toy Story, when Woody brings it home to a dejected Buzz that he is not a Space Ranger, but a beloved children’s toy. Buzz becomes more himself, and finally learns his true value.
Dwight: [turns around] [amazed] Michael. I can't believe you came.
When, in season 4’s ‘Did I Stutter?’, Stanley is publicly insubordinate to Michael in a less serious way, Michael is able to recognise that Stanley is not part of his line of succession, and is able to take Stanley aside, admit that he knows Stanley doesn’t respect him, and tell him that, nevertheless, Stanley can’t talk to him like that. Stanley, perhaps relieved to be recognised for once as who he is, agrees to be less snarky in future.
Jo: Well, give me a shout if I can brighten your life.
Both versions of The Office, however, featured personal growth in their characters.
The entire stretch from ‘Money’ to ‘Dinner Party’ is the trauma that fatally cracks the Michael/Jan axis. In the immediate aftermath of it, Dwight rescues Michael from Jan. Michael regresses so far beyond helplessness that, when he’s riding in Dwight’s car to spend the night at Dwight’s house, he sticks his head out of the window like a dog.
Still and all, when Jim has loyally discharged his Bestischmensch duties, he does the only thing he can possible do, which is step aside and bring back, from the symbolic dead, the spiritual father, Michael, to be the true Bestischmensch for Dwight.
… That’s what she said.
Do I really, honestly believe it?
He couldn’t stand the idea that people were laughing at what it is, as opposed to what he wanted it to be.
She was meant to be the first character who simply liked Michael: an amiable, rather dorky woman who used bad jokes and funny voices and mild sarcasm as a way of negotiating awkwardness.
He muses on various different ways of doing this, and being Michael he settles on the obviously wrong way—but then, crucially, he doesn’t do it.
Both of them know Michael’s habits extraordinarily well, because he’s as predictable as an infant. If he eats a family-sized chicken pot pie for lunch, he will fall asleep. If he eats a lot of sugar, he will have a manic sugar rush and then, sure enough, fall asleep.
And he would never have been able to accurately assess his own motivations, and he would never have been able to remember, while still angry, that he loved that person.
‘The Client’: skippable synopsis
I didn’t talk about capitalism. And I could have. But I didn’t.
For once, the chief source of awkwardness is not Dwight, who crashes the party with his date, his former babysitter, and who seems relatively sane, compared to Michael with his comically tiny plasma screen television, and Jan compulsively dancing and crooning along to her former assistant Hunter’s awful CD. Dwight has also come prepared, bringing his own food in the form of turkey legs and beet salad, thereby underlining that he can survive in this god-awful house but Jim and Pam must go hungry.
Be grateful you were spared that.
Michael is aware that Dwight is himself highly immature, as witnessed by Dwight’s extreme gullibility and his susceptibility to Jim’s pranks. Jim represents something Michael needs: Dwight, in the early seasons, represents something Michael wants to avoid.
The next thing that has to happen is that he has to psychologically detach himself from Packer.
At the airport, a visibly more cheerful Michael takes off his radio mic, bids the film crew goodbye with a last That’s what she said gag, and casually ambles off, independent, free at last from the need to perform for the camera.
Jim and Dwight have become true brothers.
There's always a distance between a boss and the employees. It is just nature's rule. It's intimidation mostly, it's the awareness that they are not me. I do think that I am very approachable, as one of the guys.
Michael looks… stunned.
But after Holly’s observed Packer at length, she refuses to take the bait, and bluntly describes Packer as a ‘jerk’. Michael is confused, and tries to cling onto the image of Packer as a fun-loving master of misrule.
And this time around, Michael is no longer in his bubble of comforting illusions. Holly is in the next room, more real to him than his movie is. He’s no longer seeing the movie that he wanted it to be: he’s seeing it through the eyes of everyone else in the room.
Still, ‘The Carpet’ is the last time Michael wholeheartedly endorses Packer. When Packer took a dump on Michael’s carpet, he finally did the thing that made Michael begin to think of Packer as someone who had to be excused.
During the deposition, Michael realises that Jan has submitted his personal diary as evidence, with neither his knowledge nor permission. He further realises that she gave him a bad performance review after they had started dating. Finally, he learns that he was never seriously considered for a corporate position.
Michael has a hissy fit and stops the screening. Outside the conference room, he goes to Holly for confirmation that his masterpiece isn’t just laughable nonsense, but she can’t give it to him.
The main cast of The Office, US version, season 3, except for the black-haired woman at the back on the left, a minor supporting character who doesn’t really belong in this photo but I guess she was there on the day.
Not so much sources as books and websites that helped inform how I thought about this answer:
Holly: Um...
Michael: Well, if you like her so much, don't give up.
And here we need to go back to Jan Levinson.
The tension between Jan’s unquestionable authority and her presence as a person gets stretched and snapped in the crucial season 2 episode ‘The Client’, where for the first time we see Michael Scott operating in the sphere of his competence.
(And I’m thinking more the slack and self-indulgent 1960 Ocean’s 11, than the slick 2001 Ocean’s Eleven.)
Four episodes later, Michael leaves Dunder Mifflin, and the show, to live in Colorado with Holly.
By season 6 ep 6 ‘Whistleblower’, Dunder Mifflin has been taken over by a larger company, Sabre, and David Wallace is out. The new boss, Jo Bennett, is an ambiguous figure with regard to Michael’s development: neither a father- nor a mother-figure. Michael struggles to adapt to her being the new boss, which involves him standing up to her; it doesn’t get the results he wants, but it does make him feel more grown-up.
(Holly’s sarcasm is nicely understated.)
There are a lot of things I’ve left out of what’s already a very long answer.
However, because The Office is a comedy and not an academic paper, this is disrupted from the very start by Michael finding her attractive.
Jan in ‘Dinner Party’, becoming the devil.
Jan has arranged for her and Michael to meet a client at the Radisson hotel for lunch, to broker a deal where Dunder Mifflin will supply paper to local government. The client, Christian, has to cut costs, and Dunder Mifflin are more expensive than their big chain competitors. Michael switches the meeting to his favourite local restaurant, Chili’s, without Jan’s permission.
Seinfeld itself deferred its characters from learning anything for so long that the only way they could finally end the show was to send the characters to prison.
However, not all of his employees realise this: only the relatively grown-up ones, such as Jim and Pam.
Holly: Well, why do you have to make a movie at all?
Pam doesn’t find the office any more magical than Jim does, and she is upset to think that this, after all, is who they are, when she knows that they could do better.
I’m sure you know the story, and skip the next bit if you do.
Michael proceeds to closely inspect Dwight’s teeth (this scene is so weird) and eventually confronts him with the knowledge that he knows everything.
why that isn’t a ‘failure’ on its part;
Jim admits to Michael that he’s dejected about this, but Michael, who himself has been humiliated over the captain of their vessel putting him in his place, is surprisingly encouraging:
Jim: Yeah. She's really funny, and she's warm. And she's just... well, anyway.
He begins as an utterly self-absorbed manchild, with poor relationships with other people and a weak but malicious sense of humour, which switches itself off whenever he feels like people are laughing at him, rather than at his crappy jokes.
I rest my case.
In ‘Dinner Party’ we learn that Jan has taken over an entire room of Michael’s condo for her experiments in candle-making, and forces Michael to sleep on a tiny bench at the foot of his own bed. (In, we may note for psychoanalytical reasons, the fetal position.)
I didn’t talk about all the episodes which also support this theory—and also all the ones that undermine it.
In the episode ‘Email Surveillance’, Michael muses on his relationship with his staff:
Dwight will pay, elsewhere, for not understanding his ‘father’ better.
I didn’t talk about the show’s more dodgy episodes, such as season 3’s ‘A Benihana Christmas’, where one joke turns on Michael’s inability to tell his date from another woman (because they’re both Benihana waitresses, and all Asian people look alike, you see.)
‘Loneliness,’ Ryan astutely replies. ‘Maybe women.’
Remember that Holly was not some late-stage element in the show. She got introduced at the end of season 4, she’s whisked away only a few episodes later in season 5 ep 6 ‘Employee Transfer’, and does not properly return until ‘Classy Christmas’, halfway through season 7. For most of the intervening period, more than two whole seasons of the show, Michael is more or less secretly pining for her.
Obviously, Michael Scott develops enormously from his beginning in season 1 to his end in season 7.
If characters grow and learn too much, they will no longer be foolish enough to get into the situations where they can be funny. For the sitcom to be funny, Basil Fawlty cannot learn to stop being a fawning snob; Father Ted Crilly can never priest up and take his job seriously; Ross in Friends can never quite lose the stick up his butt.
The responsible children: Jim and Pam
But, you see, my theory is that The Office is not primarily about the development of Michael’s soul.
Michael: Never, ever, ever give up.
It’s rather elaborate, though, so if you’re in a hurry, please bookmark this for reading later. Otherwise, get a beverage and take a seat.
Michael: I talk about a lot of things, Holly! I was eventually gonna get around to my dream! Obviously! Eleven years I could've been working on the Scarn Nebulus.
Holly: Man, someone doesn't like HR.
Michael does not joke about this, nor is he triumphant that he’s been proved right.
That figure is David Wallace. Who I’ve discussed separately.
Nevertheless, he defends the company against Jan, earning the gratitude of David Wallace, the CFO. Michael’s verdict is ‘You expect to get screwed by your company, but you never expect to get screwed by your girlfriend.’
One touch which I cite in support of my theory: when the guests have already been there for some time, Pam is distressed to find out that Jan hasn’t even started cooking the osso buco yet. Jan will later shower love on her own daughter, but at this stage she can’t provide for her symbolic ‘children’, Jim, Pam, Andy and Angela.
Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard, Northwestern University Press, 1979
Instead, when he’s alone, he asks the camera one of the wisest questions he’s ever asked: How do you tell someone you care about deeply, ‘I told you so?’
When Jim and Dwight team up to prank Packer into going to Florida, pretending to him that he’s been offered a job there, Michael is outraged, and tells them he will tell Packer.
Michael attempts to get rid of his money problems by literally climbing onto a freight train, but Jan comes to find him, and tells him that he is the one person who has stuck by her in difficult times, and they walk off holding hands.
Besides having similar verbal habits, such as doing impressions of people and then murmuring the name of the person she’s just done an impression of, she gets Michael, recognising all of his good qualities and noticing (at least at first) none of his bad ones.
For much of the show, Michael oscillates between childish self-absorption and selfishness, and an almost palpable and rather endearing adoration of, or at least startling empathy for, his employees.
But, while Michael in season 2’s ‘Christmas Party’ is mostly a whiny, selfish idiot, in the following episode, ‘Booze Cruise’, he yaws between his worst and his best.
Holly: Hey, I'm sorry. It is good.
Jo: Let me see what I can do.
Or rather, he thinks he hates HR.
So, when Holly shows up in season 4’s ‘Goodbye Toby’, Michael is initially suspicious, but when he finally meets her, she succeeds in completely disarming him by distinguishing herself from Toby, in front of Toby:
David Wallace: Sometimes, we—
I thought it was interesting that, in this meeting, Dwight is stuffing his face with waffles and sausage, whereas Jan confines herself to sipping coffee. This subtly emphasises how needy and appetite-driven Dwight is, and how cool and collected Jan is (at this point in the show, anyway.)
The seminar collapses because the staff aren’t interested, and when Michael attempts to tell Holly that it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t work, because she is genuinely upset at Meredith’s breach of ethics.
Dwight does not realise it. So, as long as Michael doesn’t grow up, Dwight can’t.
Thanks for reading.
Michael: [angrily] It was eleven years, okay? This has been my dream for eleven years, and if you don't think it's great than you're basically saying that you don't believe in my dream.
Still, there’s an element of realism to his awareness that, if a manager of a paper office in Scranton, PA is going to make a film which he wants people to take seriously, it had better be more than just an Ocean’s Eleven-type of film.
It happens in the very next episode, which is named after Packer. Packer is back in the office, and spends the episode being his usual obnoxious self, and both Jim and Dwight loathe him, but Michael laughs dutifully as always, and is keen for Holly to like him.
A humbled Dwight grovels pathetically on the floor, sobbing. The emotion in this scene goes way beyond anything necessary for a boss reprimanding an employee. But a) it’s funny to see Dwight’s hubris go boing and rebound in his face, and b) it underlines Michael’s quasi-paternal relationship to Dwight.
A situation is set up, things go wrong, there are amusing complications and after 24 or so minutes it winds up with what the creators of Seinfeld mocked as ‘hugging and learning’.
He takes the staff on a booze cruise, where Jim is crushed that Pam’s fiancé Roy finally sets a date for their wedding.
Michael: Yeah.
Toby: Nothing.
I think the ultimate example of Holly directly influencing Michael’s growth comes in season 7’s ‘Threat Level Midnight’.
If my very long exposition of this theory has entertained you, that’s all it was meant to do.
The very next episode of the show has, as its cold open, the lip dub, where almost the entire office dances and lip-syncs to the Human Beinz’ ‘Nobody But Me’.
why Dwight is so weird.
Holly: I'm real.
Holly brings human resources to Michael. Ryan’s acting convinces us that Holly is a genuinely warm person, such as the way she interacts with Kevin, who she has been told by Dwight is mentally handicapped. Because Kevin is Kevin, this is not all that hard to believe (even though Kevin is quite capable of displaying remarkable savvy when he wants to.) Of course, Holly’s beaming smile and general kindness only convinces Kevin that she’s super into him.
Jan’s turn from no-nonsense authority figure, to girlfriend from hell, to hospital administrator and single mother who’s recorded an entire album of cover versions of songs made famous by Doris Day, is one of the great joys of the show, thanks in part to Melora Hardin’s wilingness to play Jan as a complete nutjob.
Michael: Thanks. Today helped.
Stanley and Phyllis are the uncle and aunt, although Stanley in particular is uneasy in that role because he wants nothing to do with Michael’s development. In Michael’s mind, Stanley is a sassy, street-smart black mentor to him, not the grumpy white-collar worker that Stanley actually is.
Never again do they resume their former antagonism.
In an early episode, Dwight, who as usual is trying to make some wrongheaded point according to his arcane private code, asks Ryan what Michael’s greatest fear is.
I think that the reason Michael loathes Toby so much is not just Toby’s low-key, mumbly, lukewarm personality (and let’s hear it for Paul Lieberstein’s self-effacing performance) but because Toby, as HR person, represents the accumulated wisdom of the universe about all the lessons Michael desperately needs to learn in life, but, because he’s Toby, Michael can’t bear to learn those lessons from him.
Michael hates HR.
Which brings us, at long last, to Holly Flax.
The latter is a crucial moment for him. He has stopped living his life like he is a broadsword-wielding knight errant, or (as on his bad days) like he’s a Bond villain.
Michael: Is it, is it because you're afraid of where this is gonna take me? See, because I need you... to keep me grounded.
Andy, true to form, is so self-absorbed that he’s largely oblivious to the intensely radioactive cloud of passive-aggression that’s boiling between Michael and Jan, while Jim and Pam start out by finding it funny, and end up finding it excruciating.
why the lip dub cold open at the beginning of season 7 is so essential;
Holly: Really, you can't think of anything else that you might have?
It doesn’t matter that it’s terrible. That’s actually what’s good about it.
‘Dinner Party’ is one of the ultimate examples of the family dynamic in the show, with Michael and Jan as warring parents, and Jim, Pam, Andy and Angela as their more or less mortified children witnessing the break-up.
Packer goes to Florida.
And:
Michael: You know, I would be willing, under the right circumstances, to do that for you.
Holly manages to say this without unduly offending Toby, almost as if she’s gently mocking Michael for having such a ridiculously low opinion of Toby. But it serves to flip Michael completely in her favour.
Which brings me to my theory.
It is one of the pivotal moments for Michael: a moment when he realises, and accepts, his true stature in his life.
It’s an Oedipal situation, except Oedipus doesn’t kill Laius: he just unsuccessfully tries to take over the office from him. (Michael may also be unconsciously disturbed that Dwight went behind his back to Jan, who Michael regards—not very accurately—as a former lover.)
However, Pam herself shatters the strenuous politeness when she exclaims in horror at seeing her mom playing a sexy nurse, and then Jim can’t keep it in anymore when he sees the absurd dance sequence, ‘The Scarn’.
Jim: She's engaged.
When it turns out that Sabre printers have a tendency to catch fire, Jo knows that the company has to make some sort of recognition of this, but she has very good reasons for not wanting to:
One of the things that more recent American sitcoms have liked to do is show the characters growing.
But although Jan does return, she is never again the force of nature that she is here. She is not, in the end, the paternal authority figure that Michael still needs to measure himself by.
Angela encourages him to take over the office from Michael, so Dwight arranges a meeting in a diner with Jan where he lays out his idea that she should make him manager.
It’s also, I would argue, the American show’s ultimate revenge on the British show, in terms of cringe comedy. The whole episode piles awkwardness upon hideous awkwardness, climaxing with Michael’s lament about the physical toll that multiple vasectomies have taken on his body.
The symbolic death of Packer is part of this. He returns for the season 8 Florida sequences.
Michael grows up, a little.
Look at the sheer economy of how B.J. Novak wrote this conversation:
Jo: When I was growing up, there was nothing better than being a big old business tycoon. And I thought I'd break that glass ceiling and be a hero to all those little girls out there... and they'd make a Barbie out of me. […] I, did I sell cheap printers? I do. But if I have to go out there in front of the press and make one of them public apology recalls, I mean, it's all I'll ever be remembered for. Nobody will want to play with my Barbie.
But Packer tells Michael, I'm gonna tell you something that none of these people have the stones to tell you. It's your girlfriend, man. She's uptight.
Michael: Yeah, you're a real pain in the ass. And I'm gonna go watch the movie with people who think it's great! And I'm sorry I called you a pain in the ass, I'm angry, and I love you.
The armour-piercing question.
There’s just one thing he didn’t reckon on.
Michael: [crying] I feel like all my kids grew up and then they married each other… It's every parent's dream.
But the story as a whole puts Michael in the position of a father to the family of his employees. Which is a role Michael has to grow into, because he is comically unfit for it. He wants all the power and love that a benevolent father might get, but for the longest time he can’t give it back, because he’s obsessed with his need to be given it first.
It’s there because that’s the only possible reaction the show can have to the idea that Holly may return. A goofy explosion of joy and good humour.
Michael: Because, if I don't have this, what do I have? I have nothing.
It’s symbolically interesting that Michael’s departure is so low-key and so understated.
Michael, now the sole earner in their relationship, quickly runs into money problems, which he attempts to solve by declaring bankruptcy, except that he’s under the impression that you do that by walking into a public place and saying in a loud voice, ‘I… DECLARE… BANK-RUPT-CYYYYYY!’
Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, Princeton, 1969
He lets it go. By the next episode, all is forgotten and the office likes Holly again.
Dwight mistakes himself for someone with the same status as Michael. He expects Jan to calculate that he would be a suitable replacement and behave accordingly. Jan, who knows that she is not in a political thriller, interprets Dwight’s demand not as a power move but as ordinary insubordination, and bluntly instructs Michael to get his office in order.
Holly is an element in Michael’s universe that is both subversive and healing.
Michael: Hi. Yeah. Right. Okay, well, they hired a female Toby. Good for the world. Thank you, God, for creating two of you. Here's how things work here: my job is to make the office fun. Your job is to make the office lame. And we have an eternal struggle, you and I. And only one of us can be the winner. Spoiler alert: I'm gonna win.
Once Michael has left the show, and the symbolic death-of-the-father has happened, the remaining characters are free to grow up as they will.
Two seasons later, in ‘Threat Level Midnight’, Michael has finally finished the terrible movie he’s been making for years, using the office staff as cast. He announces that he’ll screen it for everyone.
Jim, for his part, is content to be an underachieving paper salesman with a loving family, and has abandoned his plans to switch jobs to the now-thriving business he helped found.
Jo: I hope your rough patch ends soon.
Dwight’s estrangement from the world of society has something to do how he seems to belong to a different century. In season 5 ep 5, ‘Crime Aid’, he mentions that Angela has ‘introduced’ him to, among other things, pasteurised milk, sheets and monotheism.
I think not: Jan is, as they also say, ‘the epitome of a midlife crisis’.
That is the yawning abyss of loneliness within Michael.
Actually he just hates Toby.
I have a theory about the US version of The Office, which I think illuminates both versions, but which also might illuminate:
Of course, Michael utterly fails to find food and shelter, succeeding only in destroying his suit, and only when he ingests some random mushrooms does Dwight come charging out of hiding and force him to spit them out (in a peculiar reversal of Michael’s inspection of Dwight’s teeth in ‘The Coup’). Cured of the need to prove himself in the wild, Michael returns to the office, where his newfound enthusiasm for the office and its comforts bucks him up, and he single-handedly rescues Jim’s lame attempt to organise a combined birthday.
Michael: No, David, you listen to me. Why did you send her away? That—God. You knew I liked her and you just sent her away. And that… that was a sucky thing to do, man.
Michael can’t stand to be schooled by someone so entirely unlike him: such a droopy, dreary, brown-suited killjoy.
Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey’s wonderful Office Ladies podcast was also very useful.
Only Jim figures it out, and he and Michael say an emotional goodbye by discussing the goodbyes that they will never make, at the lunch they plan to have ‘tomorrow’, that they know they will never have. Michael’s departure is rather like the unexpected death of a family member: one minute they’re there and you’re making plans, then they’re gone.
Michael: No. He tortured me... with his awfulness.
‘Wrong,’ says Dwight, his eyes gleaming with triumph. ‘Michael Scott isn’t afraid of anything. Also, I would have accepted “snakes”.’
She uses her common sense and sympathy to expel him from the infantile world of fantasy that he lives in, and consoles him with her mere presence for that expulsion. When she is sent back to Nashua, this process is only half complete, and so he is sorely wounded.
In terms of the family dynamic that I describe in this show, it makes perfect sense that Holly is Toby’s replacement in HR.
He and Jan do have a superficially similar I love you/I love you moment at the end of ‘The Deposition’ but in context, it’s cold and unconvincing. Here, it’s two lovers reassuring each other that their love is stronger than this fight, but yes, they’re still definitely having a fight.
Michael: Okay. Hey, [jokingly] you could transfer Holly back from Nashua.
Convinced that he needs to undergo a wilderness ordeal, he decides to go on one by himself, getting Dwight to take him deep into the forest and leaving him there with only a knife and a roll of duct tape. Unknown to him, Dwight remains behind to keep an eye on him, using the scope on his hunting rifle as a telescope. (Dwight’s own paternal instincts finally kicking in.)
David Wallace: Michael, sometimes—
Michael treats Dwight’s professional betrayal of him as something intensely personal and familial. Dwight’s excuse for leaving the office to meet Jan was that he was at the dentist, so Michael, simmering with barely concealed rage, asks him the dentist’s name: Dwight, who is terrible at deception, can only come up with ‘Crentist’.
Obviously, Michael is the biggest manchild in the office: the character who most desperately needs to grow up.
Michael: No it's not. [smiles, kisses her] It's not. But, they really seem to be enjoying it.
It’s longer, and tougher, and has more twists and turns, and it’s more fleshed-out, but when you take the whole thing as it comes, it’s a great deal more satisfying.
Having got even with his ‘children’, Michael visibly relaxes, tells them he’s kidding, and sincerely adds, You guys are the reason I went into the paper business. He has at last learned the grade-school-level lesson of being able to take a joke.
By season 4 episodes 7/8, ‘Money’, she has moved into Michael’s condo.
Let’s grab this thing and shake it until we get some results.
We need to talk about Todd Packer.
Dwight is the other-son, the disappointment to Michael, the one who actually gives Michael the loyalty and love Michael craves but which Michael in this instance doesn’t want, because it comes from Dwight.
That’s why he’s no longer watching in a tense silence. He’s remembering the shoot and how much fun it was.
At long last, he behaves like a salesman in a paper company, the job he excels at. He even says that Jim should be manager instead of him.
Holly: Wha- It's your dream and you never even mentioned it before!
Holly: I love you too.
Michael freezes. Packer has insulted the person closest to his heart.
In the first season and a half, Jan is basically the all-father, the ultimate authority figure, the person with the power to order Michael what to do, and reprimand him for doing things badly. Jan is the line beyond which no-one may cross.
So Michael does do that, and at the end of the episode, Jo is appreciative:
Dwight’s immaturity rears its head in season 3’s ‘The Coup’, where he mistakes the story he is in for a political thriller, instead of a family drama.
Packer is solely interested in following his every last immediate impulse. It’s not that he’s anti-social: that would imply an intellectual attitude, which Packer is not capable of having. It’s that society means nothing to him. Again, not unlike an infant.
This moment seems to me to be a version of one of those archetypal moments in stories—not necessarily American stories—where a character realises who they are, and humbly or bravely accepts a humdrum reality as opposed to a grandiose fantasy.
The US version, however, took the idea of ‘growth’ and hugely expanded and elaborated on it. Which made it more ambitious and, I think, ultimately more impressive than the UK version.
Packer is Michael’s evil twin, another irresponsible and self-centred manchild, except that Packer entirely lacks Michael’s need to be loved.
[Michael hangs up on him.]
Jan’s most sympathetic moment and her least come very close to each other, in season 4, after she’s been fired from Dunder Mifflin for screwing up at work too often.
This plays directly into the next episode, ‘The Deposition’, in which Michael has to testify in Jan’s wrongful dismissal suit against the company.
Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, W.W. Norton, 2006
… That’s what she said.
The angry silence in which Michael and Jan drive home is the smouldering mound of garbage that ignites in the next episode, one of the show’s very greatest: ‘Dinner Party’.
And here’s where the family dynamic plays out.
Michael: No, no. Holly, this isn't Ocean's Eleven, where you get together with all your friends and just have fun and don't care about how it turns out. What'd you really think, honestly.
The film crew’s presence encourages Michael to perform, all the time: perform the role of world’s best boss, father to his people, office joker, cool guy, politically incorrect rebel, sensitive advocate for diversity—whatever his little mind feels like doing on any given day.
He doesn’t tell Packer about the prank.
I myself think Seinfeld is about as funny as watching a family pet get hit by a car, but they made a good point about the way sitcoms have to reset between episodes.
Michael Scott in season 1 craves something or other, but we’re not sure what. By season 2, his character comes into more focus, and we can see that what he really wants is, like all children, to be loved.
This is the completion of a stage that began in season 5 ep 11/12, ‘Stress Relief’, where Michael organised a roast of himself, and then found that he couldn’t handle people laughing at him. After going to the park and being by himself for a while, he comes back and quick-fire insults the entire staff, and an increasingly tense moment is defused when he tells Stanley You crush your wife during sex and your heart sucks, and Stanley finds this hilarious.
Watching the scene where Michael realises it was Packer, I can never quite decide whether his prolonged laughter and applause is meant to seem rather forced—like he knows he ought to find it funny and is doing his best to perform amusement for Packer—or whether he is genuinely very relieved to learn that it was just Packer being Packer, and not someone who secretly dislikes him. A tribute to Steve Carell’s acting.
Michael: BFD. Engaged ain't married.
The Wikipedia and TV Tropes pages were very helpful, as was the very thorough The Office wiki, Dunderpedia (Dunderpedia: The Office Wiki), especially for keeping track of which characters appear in which episodes.
Jim and Pam are uneasy in that they know, on some level, that they are mere subordinate players in the drama of Michael’s personal development, and are eager for him to grow up so that they can get the hell out of there.
Then, he is present when Holly’s line manager brusquely chews her out over the phone, telling her to stop trying to do her job properly, and just get the staff to sign the papers saying that they’ve had the seminar, because never mind about the stupid ethics, the company needs the discount.
why the American version is arguably better than the UK version;
In season 5 episode 3’s ‘Business Ethics’, Holly attempts to conduct an ethics seminar in the office, after it’s revealed that Meredith has been sleeping with a supplier in return for discounts.
In the last season of the show, Jim and Pam negotiate marital troubles, and Dwight finally, ruefully accepts that he has screwed up too many times to become manager.
Holly: [to Toby] What did you do to him?
She was created to be possibly Michael’s love interest. Amy Ryan said on the Office Ladies podcast that she was initially booked for only one episode, and she understood that whether or not Holly would actually become his love interest depended in large part on how well she did in the role.
What does it say about you when you’re so loyal to such an idiot? I think it says that you have so much more to unlearn.
The film crew is the mirror in which Michael sees himself as the man he would like to be.
Sure, let’s go with that.
Even Dwight gets in on it, although being Dwight he goes too far. Only Darryl and Angela remain on the outside, Angela because I said I didn’t want to be on the internet! and Darryl so that Angela can have someone to shut herself in a side office with.