Seasons Eight and Nine of The Office: A Postmortem
I love the American remake of The Office. I’m not sure I love it in a “top ten shows of all time” kind of way, but it’s definitely the show I’ve watched all the way through the most amount of times and its brought me comfort and pleasure ever since the first time I watched it back in my early high school days. It’s funny, it’s clever, it can be profoundly sad (by network television comedy standards) when it wants to be, and it did a better job earning those emotions than most of its contemporary competition.
It’s because I’m such a fanboy that I decided that I was going to stop watching it after Steve Carell announced that he was leaving the show. The Office had been on a bit of a downward turn for a season or two, and it wasn’t hard to see how this was all going to turn out. (Which exact season said downward spiral begins is a little debatable, but we'll get to that.) Again, I love the show. But I didn’t have it in me to suffer through it getting worse. So I walked away.
I was happy. I discovered other shows and found new avenues to direct my television love. But The Office always lingered in the back of my mind, and I was growing sick of having to cut my rewatches short at season seven. My curiosity finally caught up to me towards the end of my senior year of college when the final season found its way onto Netflix. (About a year after the series finale had aired.)
So I watched. I didn’t go into it expecting anything other than some slightly sub-par Office. Season eight was a bit worse than I expected, but I powered through to season nine, which was somehow even more awful. I liked the finale quite a bit, but as soon as the credits rolled, I was already out of my dorm, ranting at anyone who wanted to listen.
But life moved on, and after I had some time away from those final two seasons, I decided to watch them again. This time around, I discovered that my distaste had somehow morphed into fascination. Or at the very least, I was able to see past my impulse as a fan of the show to immediately start shitting on it. Seasons eight and nine are flawed seasons of television for sure, and some of the shit season nine pulls is pretty damn unforgivable. But they’re flawed in ways that only stick out because they’re hyper specific to the show itself and our understanding of its characters.
I’ve now watched both of these seasons a few times, and something I understand now is that these seasons were doomed for vastly different and sometimes even contradictory reasons. So for the sake of discussion, let’s explore some of those reasons!
Hey, I don’t like making negative comments about a show I love either. But knowing why bad TV doesn’t work can be just as fascinating as knowing why good TV does. The show’s been gone a while now. We can be analytical now. Also, for length’s sake, I’ll only focus on three points per season that stick out to me the most.
Season 8
1. Michael’s Replacement
Yes, it’s lame that I’m primarily going to focus on Andy in the season eight section. But I think he’s the root cause of the problems with season eight, not because he was a poor choice, but because of the way the season’s structured and the way Andy’s role is framed and laid out.
Before the premiere of season seven, when it was announced that it was going to be Steve Carell’s last, there was a brief period where I found peace with the idea of the show ending. Though I didn’t relish the idea, seven seasons is a hell of a good run, especially when the majority of those seasons were some of the best television comedy being made at the time. But then NBC announced that the show would go on, and speculation ran wild as to who would replace Michael as boss of the office. Would it be one of the regular characters, like Jim or Dwight? Would it be one of the outside candidates from the two part finale? Would it be neither?
I was of two minds. On one hand, I still thought that the best choice overall would probably be to end the show, thus not risking going further downhill. True, that would have meant ending the show on an inconclusive note where we wouldn’t ever find out who was hired to replace Michael. (A note that follows the Deangelo Vickers arc, which I personally didn’t care for.) But at least we would’ve had “Goodbye, Michael,” which for my money is one of the best episodes of the show and did a stunning job sending Steve Carell off into his blossoming career as a film actor. (Also, on a personal note, I’m a fan of many a show that got the axe before a proper conclusion, thus I’m sort of numb to the feeling. I realize this wouldn’t have been the most satisfying route.)
On the other hand, if the show had to go on, I was rooting for Darryl.
In the end, what I wanted the least was another Michael Scott. I didn’t want the show to pretend like it could still be the same without Michael, and I wanted the show to explore new thematic territory.
Unlike Michael, Darryl isn’t stupid. He’s already proven that he can competently lead employees and run an operation efficiently. Unlike Michael, Darryl has a daughter, and although Jim and Pam had somewhat of a monopoly on the child material (I say "somewhat" because while plenty of the employees had kids, they were never given any screen time outside of an episode or two), it could’ve been a nice change of pace to have a protagonist deal with the issues of having an older kid, if only so we didn’t have to have another “I want a child” arc. Unlike Michael, Darryl was the straight man. Whereas Michael was funny because he was childish and inane, Darryl was funny because he was good at cutting people down and keeping his cool. Moreover, we saw how Michael handled the idiosyncrasies of Dwight or the incompetence of Kevin and so on and so forth, and I thought it would’ve been nice to see how the opposite of Michael handles them.
I realize Darryl’s character doesn’t scream “comedy,” and if you’re of the mind that they should’ve changed as little as possible, I can see why you would’ve wanted someone else. However, if the main defining dynamic of The Office was employees dealing with a stupid boss, I personally think there was just as much to be mined from flipping the dynamic to a competent boss keeping the ship afloat, especially when dealing with the “Dwight, Kevin, Meredith, Ryan, Kelly, Creed, etc.” faction.
And most of all, I just think Craig Robinson’s incredibly funny and talented.
But they went with Andy, which I felt at the time was the boring choice. It was the choice that indicated to me that the show didn’t really want to change, and thus my decision not to keep watching was even easier to make.
Or at least this is what I thought at the time.
2. Andy As Boss Could’ve Worked…
Now that I’ve had some time and distance, I can respect the decision to choose Andy. When it was announced that Andy would be the new boss, part of why I didn’t like it was because I was too focused on what I didn’t like about him, as well as how much in common he had with Michael. Like Mike (hehe), Andy isn’t exactly the brightest of the bunch, and if you saw his character debut in season three, you’ll know that he doesn’t exactly leave the best first impression.
And just to be clear, I would argue that he was always antagonistic in a good way. I may have disliked him as a person, but not as a character. I’ve met many Andy Bernards in my life, and that’s where they’re from and that’s how they behave. So yes, I found Andy annoying, but only because the writers always did such an incredible job with his material. As a representation of a particular kind of blowhard, he was terrifyingly real.
However, what I didn’t focus on were his redeemable qualities. The positive traits he had in common with his former boss. Like Michael, Andy has a certain sweetness about him. He comes from wealth and the upper crust, but he never judges people based on where they’re from or how they grew up. The writers managed to find a place for Andy where they could make fun of his elite upbringing, but also make sure he wasn’t a monster.
More importantly, Andy is driven primarily by insecurity. There’s an ongoing joke that Andy’s the worst of the sales staff, which if you think about it was never particularly surprising. After all, he’s a pushover, he’s afraid of confrontation, and he doesn’t know how to reign in the louder parts of his personality in order to be taken seriously. But as Robert California would later say, Andy’s personality makes him somewhat of an underdog, and I can see how and why people would root for him. Where we find commiseration, we also find empathy, and we sure do commiserate with Andy quite a bit during his time on the show.
So it could’ve been a show about Andy overcoming his self-doubt to take control of the office and have his employees respect him. It could’ve been, “Hey, I need to stop with the Cornell stuff because now that there are larger consequences for my actions, it’s off-putting and alienating.” or “Do I still value a cappella as much as I once did now that I may or may not have found something more engaging?” To put it more plainly, it could’ve been about a weak person who finds his strength when he takes on greater responsibility.
And at season eight’s best, that’s exactly what it’s about. I liked seeing Andy stick up for his employees with Robert in the first episode. I liked it when he stood up for himself with Darryl in “Lotto” while also assuaging Darryl’s misery at being passed over. I liked seeing him enlist David Wallace in order to dethrone Robert.
It could’ve worked.
3. …But We’ll Never Know Because Of Robert California
Before I go on any further, let me be abundantly clear: Robert California, on paper at least, is an incredible character. Though we’ve seen plenty of incompetence throughout The Office’s run, there’s a specific type we’ve never seen up until this point, and that’s a pure bullshit artist. Robert California speaks like a poet, lives like a king, and has the appearance of someone who knows what they’re doing when it comes to business. But it’s all head games for the sake of head games, and nearly every decision he makes in regards to his job throughout his tenure on the show is the wrong one. (Also helpful: James Spader making a full course meal out of each and every one of his lines.)
My problem isn’t in the conception of Robert California as a character. My problem is with how his character functions and the role he plays in the power structure of the show.
Michael Scott was the protagonist of the show. True, Jim and Pam provide much of the substantial emotional content, but they’re rarely in the driver’s seat when it comes to moving the story forward and it was often their job to react to Michael’s behavior. So if you’re replacing Michael, you’re effectively becoming the new protagonist of the show, which means you need agency to make active decisions and put them into effect. You need power, or at the very least, you need to earn power.
Andy is never given the opportunity to do either. Though there are a few moments where we see Andy hatch a plan and execute on it, most of the time, his role is to react to the random whims of Robert California or the more burdensome of his employees. (I realize I said earlier that a flip in the boss/employee dynamic could be interesting, but not at the expense of the protagonist’s agency.) Dwight creates a “doomsday device” to increase productivity, so Andy has to scramble to clean up the mess. (Granted, he did give Dwight permission to make it, but it still doesn’t feel like Andy’s in charge.) Robert doesn’t want his wife hired at the company, so Andy spends the whole episode dealing with his mixed messages. Andy jams with his bandmates Darryl and Kevin in the warehouse, but Robert soon joins them and effectively kicks them all out.
What this effectively does is change Andy’s role in name only. Though he’s positioned to be the new boss and protagonist of the show, he’s still effectively just as an underling and a side character. Robert California, in function, is actually the new Michael Scott and Andy is still the same ol’ Andy he was all along.
It’s understandable that if you didn’t want the show to change that much, you probably don’t have as much of a problem with this protagonist agency stuff. But I do because it’s another form of creative stagnation. Here’s my confession: In hindsight, I do believe that there was a version of The Office that could have worked without Steve Carell, as much as I love him as an actor and his performance as Michael Scott. However, the one thing you couldn’t do if you wanted to make that show work is to pretend like Michael leaving never happened, and that’s exactly what they did by saddling Andy with Robert California.
And again, I love me some Robert. Who doesn’t?
However, a new boss should mean a new direction. As much as I like Robert, he’s more effective when used sparingly, and my sympathies remain with Andy. Making Robert CEO was a smart move. After all, as much as I love me some Kathy Bates, Jo Bennett was not the strongest character The Office has ever conceived in terms of originality, and CEO is a position that fits Robert’s stature. However, this isn’t a show about the CEO of a major company. It’s a show about people in a small office in a small city trying to get by. It’s about creating a rewarding life in an unrewarding job, and it would’ve been nice to see Andy find himself in that environment. Too bad we’ll never get to see it.
Other Thoughts
I like Nellie a lot on paper. She has a lot in common with Robert, albeit a Robert who’s more transparently stupid, and I like how reckless and self-destructive she can be. However, I don’t think the show really knew how it felt about her until way too late, so when they tried to make her more sympathetic, I just wasn’t buying it.
As much as I love Kevin, there is simply way too much Kevin in season eight. (And season nine, now that I’m thinking about it.)
The Office is primarily an episodic show, but I always thought it did a surprisingly great job keeping track of its narrative through-lines. That said, season eight does a pretty poor job of it. The show would straight up forget about, say, Darryl and Val or Andy’s new girlfriend for multiple episodes in a row, and while you can’t do everything in every episode, you can’t just bring things up and ignore them until convenient either.
I can’t be the first person to make this observation, but the Florida storyline feels a bit too much like The Michael Scott Paper Company. (One of my favorite storylines the show ever did.)
Season 9
1. Jim and Pam
When did the decline of The Office truly begin? I think we can all agree that it started during some nebulous point after season four, and the specifics depend entirely on your own tastes. For me at least, I would say that there were warning signs in season five, but I would argue that it began in earnest in season six. Which isn’t to say it was a weak season. It was a solid season with a lot of fantastic stuff. It just didn’t have anything that I would personally call transcendent for the show.
But that’s not why I would say that’s where the decline starts. I say this because if you want to know how any given season of The Office was doing, all you had to ask yourself was whether or not the Jim and Pam material was working. Part of the reason those early seasons work so well was because the show’s writers did an incredible job making you root for Jim and Pam to get together, and they did so by making their storylines relatable and selling the heartache when Pam turned Jim down in the end of season two or when Pam had to watch Jim and Karen from afar in season three.
There was always a conflict, and you can start to feel the decline in season five when the best thing they could come up with involved simply separating them for a bit. (Season five made up for it in other departments, but still.) Season six had them get married and have their first child, which was often entertaining, but rarely came with any actual tension. Thus the show started to introduce other potential romances, such as Erin and Andy and Michael’s various flings.
As fond as I am of Jim and Pam as a couple, I wanted some sort of wedge between them, if only for the sake of interesting television. Part of what convinced me to try these two seasons was hearing that there was finally some sort of divide between the two. So the problem isn’t in the presence of conflict. The problem is, once again, how it’s framed.
Jim impulsively takes a second job at a Philadelphia based sports agency without telling Pam. He also invests the entirety of their nest egg into the business as well. With their second child now born, the question then becomes to uproot the family and move to Philadelphia or stay behind and continue to enjoy the life that they’ve built together, the option that Pam prefers. And this is where the rift begins.
Of course, Jim fucked up. He fucked up when he bought the house without telling her and he fucked up this time around as well. And of course, the tremendous burden he puts on Pam whenever he has to go to Philly is far far from nothing. However, we relate to characters because of the reasons they make the decisions they make, and at least Jim’s motivations are clear. He wants a job where he approaches his work with passion, he thinks it’ll make for a better life for his family, and he wants to live in a city with actual culture and a sense of place. (Okay, maybe that one’s more me talking than Jim, as I’m definitely a city person.)
On the other hand, the only real reason the show gives us for why Pam wants Jim in Scranton is that she likes her life there. It’s an understandable feeling for sure. After all, I moved to Los Angeles from the DC suburbs in Virginia a little under four years ago, and while I have what seems like an instinctual dislike of suburbs in general, my disdain for Los Angeles is often stronger. (My point is I understand where Pam’s coming from.) However, the show never digs deeper as to why she likes her life in Scranton so much. Or more specifically, why she doesn’t want change. Of course there’s risk in starting a business and making things work somewhere else, especially when your husband decides for you on impulse. But there has to be a reason bigger than “I like my life as it is.”
Thus, as sympathetic as Pam’s situation may be, and as right as she is on paper, I would argue that the show frames this conflict in such a way that you’re rooting for Jim. Again, we like characters that do things and try to make life better for themselves. As a result, we’re automatically rooting for Jim to succeed, and because the show doesn’t go deeper into her motivations, Pam is positioned by the show as an obstacle to be overcome rather than as a partner who disagrees with her husband.
If we hadn’t spent the last few years rooting for Pam, this move would’ve just been lazy and kind of misogynist. But we do care about her, and as such, their conflict feels undercooked and lopsided. I’m always for tension, but not at the expense of the most important relationship on the show.
2. The Documentary Crew Stuff Doesn't Work/Fuck Brian
Though Arrested Development wasn’t a true mockumentary so much as a traditional comedy shot in a documentary style, it gave birth to a brief period in the early 2010s when we were drowning in mockumentaries. The Office beget Parks and Recreation, up in Canada they were making Trailer Park Boys (which I’ve never seen), Modern Family kept winning every award on the planet much to everyone’s chagrin (which I’ve also never seen), and I was an intern at a TV development company reading mockumentary pilot after mockumentary pilot after mockumentary pilot.
I’m not saying these were bad shows. My enthusiasm for Parks and Rec knows no bounds and half the reason I’m writing this very article is because I love The Office as much as I do. I’m also not bringing this up to critique the genre. (If you want that, go watch the first mockumentary episode of Community.) I’m bringing this up to point out that at some point, one of these shows had to fall on the sword and address whether or not the documentarians filming the characters were going to have any bearing on the plot, and if so, whether or not we'll get an idea of what they’ve been making this whole time. As we all know now, the answer should’ve been “No.” However, it was only a matter of time before one of these shows was going to try and make it work. Unfortunately, that show was The Office.
The show has always acknowledged the presence of the film crew and the project they’re making. Early on in the show when Pam suspected Dwight and Angela were seeing each other, the crew, with a tip of the camera, showed Pam that Dwight was eating a candy bar Angela bought earlier. (Specifically, if memory serves me correctly, in the ninth episode of season two, entitled “Email Surveillance.” There. Office nerd credentials successfully flashed.) Another example is in the season five episode “Crime Aid,” as Michael accidentally turns his mic pack all the way up before having sex with Holly in the office.
However, never have any of the crew members been on screen, nor have any of them as individuals had an active role in the story. Most of the time, they act as an invisible presence. (Or at least as invisible as they can be.) It’s because of this relationship that we find the show funny and engaging. There’s a sect of comedy writers who like to make fun of the mockumentary format because many consider it lazy that you can cut away from the story to have a character explain what’s going on in a talking head, then cut back like nothing happened and keep the story intact. Though I agree with the basis of the gripe, at the end of the day it’s more of a hypothetical problem than an actual one. The only thing that matters is if what we're watching is funny and affective, and the framing device works as long as it’s a framing device and nothing more.
So in the first episode of season nine where Jim and Pam start talking to the crew about why they’re still filming, I took it as a bit of a break of an unspoken contract. As the season began to play with it more, I remember thinking that it might to lead to something interesting story wise. But then it became clear that the point of the crew interactions was to build up Brian the sound guy, who eventually comforts Pam after she cries following an argument with Jim and protects her after Frank the warehouse guy/Officer Piscatella marches at her in the parking lot.
(I couldn't find a higher quality video. Apologies all around.)
So not only was the contract broken, but it was broken for a reason I found kind of dumb, which is to throw a contrived wrench into Jim and Pam’s relationship. Brian, in the end, is just another obstacle, and not a particularly interesting or compelling one at that. To me at least, he’s a random guy who’s studied a woman for close to a decade, and now wants to wedge his way in using methods that border on emotional manipulation. I say “to me” because yes, I did read that Buzzfeed thing that was making the rounds a while back, and while it has plenty of valid points, I can’t back Brian under any circumstances. He’s not a knight in shining armor. He’s a married man with an infatuation for another woman that he probably mistakes for love. Or to put it more delicately, he’s just some asshole.
To be fair, I think some of the documentary stuff in the later episodes does work, or at least I find them interesting in theory. (Mainly the idea of the panel being a way to address Pam’s part in Jim’s decision to leave what would’ve been a prosperous job at the sports agency.) However, that stuff works because the crew goes back to being invisible. If there’s a grand intellectual crime Brian commits in stepping in front of the camera, it’s that he exposes the framework of the show. I understand what the show was trying to do with Brian, and there’s a parallel universe out there where it may have worked. But I care for these characters because of the way The Office frames them, and Brian’s only role is to break the frame.
3. Andy Becomes Insufferable
Of the offenses season nine commits, one might argue that this point is relatively low ranking on the list. Andy, after all, sits a large chunk of season nine out due to Ed Helms being away shooting The Hangover Part III, thus he doesn’t play as large a role in the overall story as he had in the previous seasons.
But this one pisses me off personally because if there’s one feat season eight successfully accomplished, it’s that it made me root for Andy. Or at the very least, it moved me from a place of casually liking Andy to actively rooting for him to be successful and have a good life, and though there are parts of his personality that rub me the wrong way, it would make me sad if the show decided to do something terrible to him.
With a few small strokes, season nine burns all that good work to the ground.
Let’s start with Andy’s boat journey with his brother. In the front half of the season, Andy’s family loses all their money thanks to some dubious decisions by his father. Andy handles the fallout surprisingly well, but at some point, he realizes that he has to sell the beloved family boat. He visits the boat to find his brother living on it, and impulsively decides to take it to Bermuda for the sake of brotherly bonding and giving Ed Helms his out to go film a shitty movie.
What angers me isn’t the decision in of itself. What angers me is the wasted potential of watching Andy truly move past the family who never appreciated him or showed him any respect. The fact that will never see a storyline where Andy finally frees himself from the shadow of his father. And I realize that movies had to be shot and whatever whatever, but it would’ve been the perfect ending for Andy as a character, as in a weird way, the whole show has been setting up this arc.
But we’ll never get to see that play out, as he goes to sea and disappears for eight episodes. Not helping matters is that he comes back a total asshole. He tries to pretend like up and leaving was no big deal, he has his employees lie on his behalf so he can keep his job, he manipulates David Wallace into not firing when he absolutely should have, he acts in a needlessly passive aggressive manner to his employees for giving him shit, and the list goes on and on.
However, the worst offenses are committed towards his girlfriend Erin, one of the most likable characters in the later seasons of the show. Erin, in the time since Andy’s absence, has moved on to Pete, the new employee who treats her with respect and didn't impulsively abandon her. When Andy returns, he acts like nothing happened, and expects Erin to act the same.
Then when he finds out she’s dating Pete after she breaks up with him, Andy hires Pete’s ex, with whom the breakup was apparently rather nasty, and makes them sit next to each other, as well as bringing back Erin's former boyfriend Gabe. And it’s in this action where I think I might’ve turned on Andy forever. Keep in mind: This is a character that’s been on the show since season three, and Andy committing this act casts such a shadow over everything he’s done that when I started rewatching the show for this article, when Andy showed up for the first time I couldn’t help but think about how he's going to punish his Erin later in the show by hiring her ex.
And yes, maybe I’m blowing this out of proportion, but I’m making such a big deal out of it because I think this is the most egregious act of betrayal the show committed during its two Michael Scott-less seasons. Andy was never a perfect human being, but at least he had a decency to him that the audience could trust, and the show broke that trust for the sake of a comedic story beat. It reeks of “We’ve creatively checked out of this show, so instead of thinking about the characters like we used to, let’s just do whatever we think is funny for funny’s sake.”
So then Andy continued to be a dick for a few episodes, then he left to chase his dream of being a singer, and I didn’t care. In some ways, that’s a pretty accurate summation of what I thought of season nine. Some extraordinarily talented writers and creatives thought they could keep the ship afloat, but instead, they made everything worse. Then it faded away.
But hey, at least that finale was pretty damn great!
Other thoughts
As broad as it was, I actually enjoyed the Angela/Oscar/“The Senator” love triangle. I don’t quite know why, but at least it was more grounded in who those characters are.
The handling of the Darryl and Val relationship was shitty.
Dwight shoots Stanley with a tranquilizer gun. Make of that what you will.
Was Any Of This Salvageable?
As down as I sound on the final two seasons, I think so, yes.
In the end, I think the biggest crime these seasons commit isn’t bad storytelling or bad ideas. (Though there are plenty of both.) In the end, it’s really missed opportunities and attacking from the wrong angle. Andy could’ve worked as boss. He just never really got to be one. Robert California could’ve been a great character. They just used him too much. A cataclysm in Jim and Pam’s relationship could’ve been an effective way to add some tension into the final season. The show just did a bad job structuring it.
Everything is so close to working, and I take that as a testament to the writers and the cast. And that’s what ultimately breaks my heart. They could've pulled it off.
Except for the film crew stuff. That was always dumb.
