If you ask anyone off the street what their favorite show on Netflix to binge watch is, I could bet you $100 (if I had that much to bet) that the top answer would be The Office. With all the hype between my friends and social media, and summer just around the corner, I decided to give it a go and see for myself what was so great about a show based on a paper company in NoWhere, PA.
To say the least, I didn’t love it, but I watched the whole series anyway, beginning to end.
“But why would you watch the entire thing if you hated it?”
Well, the truth is, at the beginning I did really dislike most of the characters. I thought Kevin was FAR too dumb to have been hired in the first place. I thought Creed was overly uncomfortable and Jan was just looney, but the worst of all the characters was Michael. He was ignorant and facetious. Time and again he got away with things that would have consequently terminated his employment at any other job. He was mean to the characters we grew to love like Phyllis, Oscar and Dwight, with few redeeming moments, and he never seemed to be doing his job correctly, if at all. I would watch and just get so frustrated with him.
Even with my unamusement with the show’s most popular character, I had somehow still managed to get hooked into watching the whole thing through. I think I got so caught up in the fact that sometimes the show made me laugh, I thought the purpose of the show was mindless comedy. I just figured the show stemmed from one of those moments everyone has when you and a few of your friends/co-workers say you should start recording your break room conversations because you think it would make a hilarious TV show.
Well, The Office isn’t primarily a comedy and you don’t realize that until the last few episodes. The Office is about the people. It’s about getting to know them all individually and watching them interact differently with different co-workers. Watching a love like Pam and Jim’s blossom despite the conditions was captivating. Witnessing the natural ups and downs of Ryan and Angela’s lives were humbling, and seeing the little quirks of seemingly normal people like Stanley was humorous.
Although, Michael and Andy, especially, were ridiculously infuriating characters to me, I still loved the rest of them. For a story about a small little paper company in a recession, it did a great job of blurring the edges so you focused on what was really important: the people.