Breaking down the pilot of THE OFFICE

Previous Pilot breakdowns:
Veronica Mars

Alias

Continuing my series of breaking down pilot episodes, today's archived tweet-thread changes things up by examining a comedy, the American version of THE OFFICE. You can find the original tweet-thread here. This pilot was written by Greg Daniels, based on the British series created by Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant.

A reason I wanted to do a pilot like THE OFFICE is the other two I did were "premise pilots." They're clearly Chapter 1s of a long story. THE OFFICE is - mostly - a story that could have happened at any point in that season. We come into an already established situation. There's definite value in writing a pilot that shows exactly what a typical episode will be, rather than just setting up the premise.

And we're off. Mockumentary concept in place from frame one. Michael's meeting with Jim about his sales. Michael's phone call establishes: he's the manager, his company sells paper products, and he's awkward. Self-consciously looks at camera.

Next, Michael addresses the camera, taking us on a tour and filling in exposition. "People say I am the best boss... You're hilarious." He has a "World's Best Boss" mug. Which he bought himself. That's a great little detail. Then we met Jim, who CLEARLY couldn't care less about his job. Michael comes in and tells an outdated joke. Jim is clearly tired of it but endures it. Dwight plays along.

Michael is caught without an agenda in meeting with his boss Jan. Problem: moments ago we've seen him tell Pam to throw it out. And Pam has to say that. In front of Jan. The reaction shots of Pam and other reacting in horror are critical. They show us the characters are as horrified by Michael as we are.

A series of shots shows the rumor about downsizing spreading through the office. Good quick way to meet everyone.

Temp Ryan arrives. Michael has a new audience for all his "Hilarious" jokes. Another reminder that EVERYTHING Michael does is playing to the camera.

Dwight bickers with Jim that some of Jim's stuff is spilling onto Dwight's desk. Instantly we know, he's THAT guy. Then we get kind of a soft break to Act One, Dwight talking head about not being scared of downsizing. Not a huge plot twist.

Michael's looks to camera are often unconscious, checking to see if they got this. Jim's are communication, "You're seeing this, right?"

Dwight says he's "Assistant Regional Manager," Michael corrects, "Assistant TO THE Regional Manager." That dynamic is fully formed in a few words.

Pam is shy, but when Michael puts her on the spot after lying to the office about downsizing, she corrects his account.

Jim knows Pam's favorite yogert. Pam is beaming when she finds out he knows that. Again, sets up THAT relationship.

Jim pranks Dwight by putting a stapler in jello. Shows Jim takes more pride in the pettiness of his pranks than his work. Also, by EATING jello when Dwight gets mad, he shows he's not above pushing buttons in a petty way. Jim always has to spike the ball.

There's a Pam/Jim exchange at the desk that's shot from a distance, implying they don't know they're being filmed at that moment. It's also we learn that Pam is engaged to Roy, who doesn't give her permission to go out for a drink with the rest of the office.

Talking head: Jim is asked if he'll be invited to the wedding. He doesn't answer. Shows the documentary crew KNOWS the story they're chasing.

Michael pulls a "prank" on Pam, accusing her of theft (of post-it notes, he eventually says) and saying he's gonna have to let her go. Michael thinks he's being funny, Pam gets upset. Michael's joke is way out of line for a boss. Even HE seems to get that when he claims Ryan was in on it. Scenes like that are an effective way of cranking up the awkwardness of what it's like to be stuck with a boss like Michael. (Been there).

Pam has another moment with Jim that's interrupted by Roy. It's worth noting who gets the most screentime with each other.

And we close the show on Jim having put Michael's mug into jello. So it's a plot-light ep. Barely an A story, but the format allows that. The story mostly is: the branch is worried about downsizing; a new office temp arrives. It's a framework to hang all the character moments. It also means these characters HAVE to come out fully formed. And Michael aside, everyone here is entirely in line with their later depictions. Michael evolves into being more of an oblivious goof than a semi-malicious one. He's got a bit more affection for these people and that makes it easier to like him. You feel sorry for the kid in school who no one wants to play with. That's Michael. You don't like the bully.

Another slight change later on is that Michael eventually seems to be playing more to the office than to the camera. It's a BIT less vain.

Ryan the temp initially appears to be the "normal" guy who will react to the insanity. Eventually they transfer that to Jim entirely. In the pilot, he's mostly there to be someone for Michael to "show off" to. Carell pretty much has to PLAY annoying without being TOO annoying to watch. That's a hard needle to thread, writing-wise. It's why the supporting cast is critical so we can imprint on people.

Similar challenge is writing a boring character who is funny to the audience. It's why Grandpa Simpson speeches were probably hard to come up with on THE SIMPSONS.

Closing thoughts: for shows like this, objectives are:

- What's the setting?
- What makes this setting relatable? (we've all had boring jobs.)
- Who is the PERFECT lead character to embody that setting, and how do you give him or her the room to demonstrate it?
- And what are the running story engines? (downsizing, Pam/Jim crush, Jim/Dwight prank war, Michael impressing Ryan.)

Other Pilot Breakdowns:
Homicide: Life on the Street
Everwood
Life
Revenge

16 Great TV Shows, Part 14: The Office

Part 1: The Wonder Years
Part 2: The Simpsons
Part 3: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Part 4: Seinfeld
Part 5: The John Larroquette Show
Part 6: ER
Part 7: Newsradio
Part 8: The X-Files
Part 9: Law & Order
Part 10: Homicide: Life on the Street
Part 11: Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Part 12: Gilmore Girls
Part 13: Everwood

Like Seinfeld, The Office finds much of its humor in the mundane. A lot of its appeal comes from the little moments that all of us can relate to as being part of our own jobs, whether it's dealing with a co-worker who makes a nuisance of himself by flaunting every bit of his limited authority, or the silent battles waged over the thermostat setting.

For me, the earliest connection I made was that the office manager I dealt with daily was EXACTLY like Michael Scott, right down to the fact that he saw himself as an entertainer as much as he did a supervisor. It was so spot-on that it was almost painful, but it's not one of the reasons this show is on the list.

For the first season of the show, Michael Scott seemed like a clueless, self-centered buffoon... and those were in his better moments. In his worst ones, (the sensitivity training session in "Diversity Day" comes to mind) he was a straight-up asshole and incompetent. It took little time to provoke the question: "If he's so stupid, how did he get this job?"

The Office brilliantly answered that early in season two, with an episode called "The Client." Michael and his boss Jan have to take an important client to dinner. It's impressed on us that this is an account they can't afford to lose. This client covers their entire county and if they lose him, it could force Dunder-Mifflin to downsize the branch. Yes, that means everyone's jobs are essentially in Michael's hands.

By now, we've seen Michael's immature antics screw up enough times that we completely empathize with Jan's cringing when Michael interrupts her "all-business" pitch with entreaties to order an "awesome blossom" for the table. By the time he's singing the "I want my baby-back, baby-back, baby-back ribs" jingle, Jan looks like she wants to crawl under the table in embarrassment and we're right there with her.


It's not until near the end of the meal that we look at this moment and Michael in a new light. The client keeps falling back on "budget cuts" as a major concern for him. We come into a conversation later in the night, as the two men are apparently bonding over their local histories.

MICHAEL
Spent my whole life right here in Lackawanna County and I do not intend on moving. I know this place. I know how many hospitals we have. I know how many schools we have. It's home, you know? I know the challenges that this county is up against. Here's the thing about those discount suppliers, they don't care. They come in, they undercut everything, and they run us out of business. And then, once we're all gone, they jack up the prices.

He's spent the whole night getting the conversation to this point. The client agrees. Jan tries to interject and Michael promptly shushes her. He knows that her help isn't needed, and seconds later, the client agrees to meet them halfway. And all of that is because Michael knew how to appeal to the guy on a personal level, not a business one.

That moment takes the oddity of Michael's leadership and immediately explains it. No matter how bad he is as a manager, he knows how to read people and spent the whole night softening the guy up for that pitch. We understand that he must have been a great salesman and that this success is probably what got him promoted to branch manager. It's the Peter Principle in action - he got promoted one level past his competence.

Michael's characterization now had an internal logic it was lacking before and the show would play off of that many times in the future. It underlined how there was real thought that went into the crafting of these oddball characters and that the show wasn't writing purely for the joke.

The Jim and Pam relationship is an even more potent instance of that. I recently had a conversation with my wife about the faction of fandom known as "shippers." These are fans that are intensely devoted a particular pairing on a TV show, generally to the exclusion of interest in any other aspect of the show. Some of these fans take the show particularly seriously, which leads them to attack competing couplings and often attack the writers responsible.

My wife couldn't comprehend being so invested in a show's couples that a person would react that extremely. We tried to figure out if there were any shows where we felt an intense connection to a particular couple's storyline. As I said, "With Dawson's Creek, I preferred Joey with Pacey and really hated the idea of her with Dawson, but it never mattered enough to me to go on the attack about. On Buffy, I think the idea of Buffy and Spike is sick and degrading her her character, but I'd never send a writer death threats over it."

And she came back with the one couple she remembered being really invested in: Jim and Pam.

Jim and Pam's relationship is one of the perfect TV slow-burn love stories. It starts as Jim's one-sided crush on his engaged officemate, then gradually shows interactions that hint that Pam might be in love with him and not realize it. The writers break that stasis by having Jim confess his feelings and leave and then spend an entire season rebuilding that relationship before following the courtship through to marriage.

It felt real and relatable. I think everyone's had feelings for someone who was unattainable at one point and so Jim's agonizing crush struck a familiar note with most viewers. The show's documentary style also invited the viewer to feel a certain intimacy with each of the characters. We're seeing stolen moments, some where the players don't know they're being filmed and some when they don't realize what they're revealing. There were times that we'd see something Jim said or did that he didn't realize was caught on camera, and then he'd either lie about it or minimize it in a confessional interview.

The Office - at its best - understood people in general and its characters in specific. The humor had to feel more naturalistic than in a typical sitcom and many of the laughs were observational in nature. Dwight's point of view was always so different from everyone else's that it would be impossible to reassign most of his lines to any other character. Same goes for Michael, or Phyllis, or Kelly, and so on.

It's a lesson not dissimilar from Seinfeld's ethos - find the little things. If there's a difference in execution it's that Seinfeld would mine minutae for story, whereas The Office did so for character, which in turn would drive story, and long-running story arcs. There are few relationships as perfectly built as the Jim/Pam trajectory in Season 2. That's how you make an audience fall in love with a couple.

Part 15: Breaking Bad

Part 16: 13 Reasons Why

Friday Free-for-All: Michael Scott vs. David Brent

Last night, The Office bid farewell to Steve Carrel's Michael Scott in a rather nice episode. The debate will probably be never be settled as to which Office "boss" was better - Michael Scott or the British equivalent David Brent, played by Ricky Gervais. Perhaps we can settle this with a simple dance-off?



I'm calling it for USA.

Don't feel bad, Brent... you'll always have your singing career.

Date Night: Hitchcock by way of 30 Rock and The Office

This past weekend I saw Date Night and found myself with unbidden flashbacks to my undergraduate days, sitting in a film classroom while my professor lectured on one of cinema's greatest minds. Having read some reviews of Date Night, I understand that while many viewers enjoyed it, there were a number of fans who were let down, partly because of the expectations they held for stars Steve Carrell and Tina Fey due to their TV shows.

That's where those viewers went wrong - this isn't 30 Rock or The Office on the big screen. As I sat back and watched the story unfold, I was thinking only one thing: This is pure Hitchcock.

Written by Josh Klausner, Date Night features the two stars as a married couple, the Fosters, that's in something of a rut. They've got two ornery kids who suck up all the time they aren't spending in their careers. Even their "date nights" out are so stale and routine that their friends know the details from memory - down to the dinners they always order. As we see in one bedroom scene, there's not even any room for romance in their relationship. The sex life seems non-existent, but it's not even that big a problem because neither of them has the energy for it anymore. It's clear - this is a marriage that's fallen into a deep slump.

So one weekend they decide to reignite the spark by getting into an exclusive new restaurant, and end up stealing a reservation from an no-show couple named the Tripplehorns. Bad move. It turns out some pretty bad people are looking for our no-shows and they want a stolen flashdrive returned. These thugs hold Steve and Tina at gunpoint in an alley, and our bewildered heroes only narrowly escape. When they go to the police, things only get worse, as it turns out our thugs are actually cops on the take.

This leads the married couple to do the only thing they can think of; find the real Tripplehorns, get back this flashdrive and give it to the bad guys in return for their lives.

This is textbook "innocent man on the run" storytelling, which just so happens to be one of my favorite genres, and there's nobody who did this kind of film better than Alfred Hitchcock. If he could turn on his computer, my film professor would be so proud that I'm using material I gleaned from his class in today's entry.

In his 1989 book Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, film commentator Robin Wood identifies 11 Hitchcock films that could be categorized as being about a wrongly accused man on the run. The formula for these films is simple, and deals with what could be termed a double chase. The hero, who also has to dodge the police in response to some element of the set-up, hunts the real criminals. In these films, the man is always innocent of the crimes he is accused of, but is guilty of some other transgression - often one that precludes him from seeking help from the authorities. The protagonist redeems himself for those crimes through his actions as he escapes his pursuers and exposes the real criminals.

Sound familiar?

Probably my favorite Hitchcock use of this trope is North by Northwest, screenplay by the great Ernest Lehman. In North by Northwest the protagonist is Roger O. Thornhill, played by Cary Grant. Thornhill is mistaken for a spy named George Kaplan by another group of spies. Those spies try to kill him, but he manages to escape and goes to the police. The spies thwart this and the police come away believing Thornhill’s claims are the ravings of a drunk. Even worse, Kaplan is later implicated in a murder that makes front-page news, which serves the purpose of forcing him to evade the police.

At this point, the audience (though not Thornhill) is made aware of part of the truth. There is no George Kaplan; he’s just an invention, a decoy so the spies won’t find the real agent sent by the Intelligence Bureau. The Bureau decides not to help Thornhill, but to take advantage of the fact that he has given the decoy life. Meanwhile, Thornhill boards a train and meets Eve Kendall. Though she helps Thornhill hide from the spies, she is quickly revealed to the audience as working with those men. She arranges for Thornhill to be alone out in the country, where he can be shot from a plane.

Thornhill escapes and realizes he’s been betrayed, catching up to Eve at an auction. This encounter ends with Thornhill in the hands of the authorities, where he learns the truth from the head of the CIA. Eve is actually the agent that the spies are looking for, but her cover is in danger. Thornhill agrees to “play” Kaplan one more time, so that Eve can shoot him (with a gun loaded with blanks) and reestablish her loyalties to the spies. Eventually Eve is discovered and Thornhill rushes to save her in a chase that leads to the faces on Mount Rushmore. By the end of the movie, the bad guys are defeated and Roger and Eve are married.

While the spy plot is somewhat complex, the focus is still on the protagonist's character growth. When Thornhill is introduced, he appears a very shallow character. An advertising executive, he seems to have an exaggerated notion of his own importance, and has two failed marriages. When he gets arrested, Thornhill calls his mother to bail him out. In fact, much of the early part of the film depicts Thornhill trying to convince his mother that his life really is in danger. The constant presence of Mother Thornhill makes Thornhill seem like a “momma’s boy” It is interesting to note that Mrs. Thornhill’s last appearance takes place only moments before Eve is introduced.

If the film is intended to show how Thornhill matures, then it only makes sense that Eve “replaces” Mrs. Thornhill as the primary female in Thornhill’s life. Some Freudian theorists believe that when men look for a woman to marry, they are subconsciously trying to replace their mother. Hitchcock might have intended this as one aspect of Thornhill’s growth, though there is other evidence of his maturation. By the end of the movie, he falls in love with Eve and puts his life at risk several times to save hers. The Thornhill introduced at the start of the picture would never climb the rocks by the lodge and risk his life to save another. Given the choice at the start of the adventure, Thornhill never would have willingly assumed the identity of Kaplan, but he does this by the end.

Despite the complexity of the story, the spy plot is still ultimately a means to an end. The real end game is Thornhill's character growth. The MacGuffin in this story is a strip of microfilm that Eve must keep from falling into the wrong hands. The microfilm is the entire basis for the spy plot, but what it contains or will be used for is of little consequence to the audience. How this affects Roger Thornhill is what gives the film meaning. As the audience sees Thornhill develop as a character, they are drawn into his dilemma. As involving as the spy plot is, it never takes the focus of the film away from Thornhill and the emphasis on character development.

And that's the same sort of structure you can find in Date Night. The whole film is based around the Fosters finding this flashdrive. For most of the movie we don't even know what's on this flashdrive, and you know what? We don't really care. All that matters is that the bad guys want it. And even that is only important because it's all a device to get the Fosters on the run, where they can work through the real issue: the malaise their marriage has fallen into.

This is not a movie about mobsters, crooked cops, dirty politicians and blackmail. This is a film about a couple that has become a prisoner of their own routines, and the story of how they break out of it and rediscover their passion. For the first time in ages, they're out of their comfort zone. Without getting too deep into spoilers, they're thrown into several high adrenaline situations, as well as one that forces Fey's character to dress up like a stripper. This not only reminds Carrell that his wife is a sexual being (God I wish I had a better term for that), but it reminds Fey that she is too.

(So I guess that means that if the sex has gone stale, the key is to get the wife to play stripper? But I digress...)

That's the real climax of the movie - the two of them jumpstarting the old flames. Everything else is just disposing of the loose ends. Actually, it's here that I'd argue the script makes its only real misstep. Without giving too much away, the flashdrive has blackmail material and the reveal of what's on that drive tips off one character to the fact that another character has double-crossed them.

Honestly, that's probably making the film too complicated. Even without the reveal of that extra double-cross, it's still possible to make that disc important and get all the necessary players who are seeking it into that final confrontation. It's an extra little twist that doesn't really affect everything that lead up to it and it absolutely has no impact on the resolution of the Foster's marriage story.

It's not a crippling problem, though. One can still follow the plot and the climax still does what it needs to with regard to tying up the script. I'm just saying that my vote would have been for simplicity. Sure, tell us what's on the disk. Show us why certain major players would want it, but don't try to get me invested in conflict between two characters who have maybe a grand total of ten minutes of screentime between them.

That very minor quibble aside, I rather enjoyed the movie. It might not be what people expected when they heard about the teaming of Michael Scott and Liz Lemon, but it's a fun movie in its own right.