During the month of April, I'll be doing a rundown of my favorite television shows and movies of all time. If you've missed any of them, check out the links at the bottom of this post for all of the past roundups.
One of my great pet peeves about people discussing
television is that they frequently will say a show isn’t as good as it used to
be when they haven’t actually been watching the show. We all know the types-the people who say they can’t stand The Simpsons or South Park anymore despite them not having watched them in ten
years. It’s annoying, because
rarely does a show of great quality dip so far that it is completely beyond
reproach in its twilight years-there’s always some magnificent episode left
before they pull the curtain.
That being said, The
Office would have been a lot higher on this list if the show hadn’t had the
final two seasons. Don’t get me
wrong-there are moments in the final seasons that I did enjoy (and I managed to
find room for the best episode from that time period on this list), but as a whole the
post-Michael Scott episodes of the show always lacked the necessity that those
with him contained. They weren’t
all bad (though, admittedly, most of Season 8 and all of the Robert California
plot was a bust), but less is more would have been a smart decision.
However, when it was good, it was fantastic, and The Office stands proudly at Number
11. Here are my ten favorite
episodes:
10. “The Job” (#3.24)
One of multiple episodes of the series that was extended
(NBC tried a number of things when they were in the ratings basement), this was
the climax of three years of will-they-or-won’t-they tension between Jim and
Pam. Yes, it also contained the
frightening downfall of one Jan Levinson (Melora Hardin sure rocked that part
the crazier she got, even if it changed the tone of the show permanently), but the principle question was surrounding whether Jim
would dump Karen to be with the love of his life. The answer was, of course, yes, and we were treated to
something bizarre for the remainder of the series that we almost never see on
television: a genuinely happy, content couple. It wouldn’t have been nearly as fun if we hadn’t spent years
wishing and a-hoping.
9. “Stress Relief,”
(#5.14)
The highest-rated episode of the series (airing after the
Super Bowl), this had the funniest cold open of the series, with Dwight staging
one of his fake safety drills to horrifying results, the best of them being
that Angela has a hidden cat at work (I’m laughing just typing about it). Stanley has a heart attack, which causes
Michael to want to relieve stress at work by doing a roast of himself. This of course ends absolutely
horribly, with each of Michael’s employees sparing none of Michael’s feelings
after he forces them to attack him.
In the end, Michael learns to fight back a bit, and is applauded for the
efforts. Meanwhile, in one of the
sweeter Jim-Pam plots of that season, we see Jim breaking up Pam’s parents’
marriage by saying how much he loved their daughter (it makes sense in
context).
8. “Customer Loyalty”
(#9.12)
It took six years, but finally there was a bit of trouble
in paradise for Jim and Pam. I
wasn’t really cheering for them to have some strife, but the fact that they
made it so many years without a large blow-up was unrealistic. Having it be Jim, though, who spent so
many years yearning for Pam, who was the one who blew up (over Pam failing to
tape their daughter’s recital) was absolutely devastating, and then we got the
WTF moment of the season-the appearance of the handsome boom operator Brian, clearly
a major part of their lives for the past nine years, breaking the fourth
wall-goosebumps! Throw in some
solid movement on the Erin/Pete story (I loved the way that mirrored Jim/Pam to
a tee, particularly having Andy be the Roy), and you have the best reason to keep the show on after Steve Carell’s
exit.
7. “The Dundies”
(#2.1)
I will admit that, while the first season was occasionally
hilarious, this was the first episode where it felt like they weren’t just
ripping off Ricky Gervais’s original series. Michael Scott was not David Brent, but a far more
complicated, decent person, even if we don’t quite get there with this
episode. I loved the way that the
entire office becomes uncomfortable with Michael being attacked by an outsider;
you have to earn the right to take down Michael. We also got the kickoff of a few stories here, in particular
the hilarious crush that Michael had on Ryan throughout the show (despite Jim
being “right there!”) and a hilarious set of awards given out to each of the
employees. It’s a testament to how
iconic this was that as Carell exited in Season 7 they felt the need to bring
back a final Dundies.
6. “Niagara” (#6.4)
Wedding episodes rarely are all that good on television-they
usually follow the same format (the bride/groom has cold feet…and then they don’t!),
and they all end lovey-dovey. This
episode falls into a number of those clichés, including everything going
wrong and the office re-enacting the JK Wedding Entrance Dance, but the final
moments made it all worth it. Jim
and Pam, married on the Maiden of the Mist, and Jim giving us the single
sweetest line he ever uttered on the series, “I bought the boat tickets the day
I saw that YouTube video. I knew we'd need a backup plan. The boat was actually
plan C. The church was plan B. And plan A was marring her a long, long time
ago. Pretty much the day I met her.”
5.
“Women’s Appreciation” (#3.22)
A sequel of sorts to the Season 2 episode “Boys and Girls,” this
episode was less reliant on Jan and almost entirely on Michael’s relationships
with the women of the office (always comic gold). After Phyllis is flashed (and Pam hilariously makes the perp
look like Dwight with a moustache), Michael decides to take the women of the
office shopping. Along the way,
they give him hilarious advice about his increasingly psychotic relationship
with Jan, and we get treated to dozens of tiny little moments. Particularly fun were Angela revealing
she shops at the American Girl store because regular retailers’ clothing is too
small for her, and the always wonderful Kate Flannery’s incredibly welcome
driving/interactions with her minivan.
4. “Boys
and Girls” (#2.15)
As I just mentioned, I heart the interactions between the women of
the office, and while both of these episodes are equally wonderful, this one
gets a step higher because it was the first time we became really aware of
their chemistry. Jan is running a
“Women in the Workplace” seminar with all of the women and Michael is left out,
with him taking this about as well as can be expected. He runs a “men in the workplace” seminar
to counter, but honestly, I could have just listened to the banter from the Jan
meeting for thirty minutes and been fine.
Amongst the best moments were Kelly asking Jan about getting to second
base with Michael (and then winking at the camera), Angela chastising Phyllis
over her workplace strength, Meredith wanting to be “five…well, four and a half
years sober,” and of course the devastating moment at the end of the episode
where Pam, realizing that she’ll never have a house with a terrace because
she’s marrying Roy and never leaving Scranton, breaking down into tears. Angela Kinsey and Jenna Fischer came up
with this idea originally, and bravo to them both for breaking up the office
boy’s club.
3. “Dinner
Party” (#4.13)
There were times I felt like the Jan character completely going
overboard was too much. It felt
like the moments when the show started to drift away from realism and
completely went into cartoon, a trait that was only exacerbated by the Ed Helms
character being an entire miss for me basically after he joined the crew at
Scranton (Andy was the worst character on the show, save for Robert
California). That said, Melora
Hardin was comic TNT in this episode that probably should have garnered her an
Emmy nomination, as she went totally off-the-wall, chucking Michael’s Dundie
and throwing the most frightening dinner party ever seen on television (and that includes the Red Wedding). The best moment of the episode, though,
has to be Pam proclaiming “awesome” when Dwight shows up with his former
babysitter/potential lover.
2. “Beach
Games (#3.23)
Pam Beasley, as you probably can tell from this write-up, was my
favorite character on the show. By
a longshot. Michael was funny, Jim
was dreamy, and Dwight was comedy gold, but what Fischer did with an “ordinary”
girl who didn’t get the life she dreamt of in high school was perfection. This was never more apparent than her
final walk-through-coal, where she bared her soul to the entire rest of the
group and confessed that her feelings for Jim were never going away. The entire episode (with everyone
competing to be Michael’s boss, which resulted in some hilarious moments for
Stanley in particular) was superb, but Fischer brought this to an entirely
different level.
1. “Casino
Night” (#2.22)
You sometimes feel when making a list like this that you have to
pick a particular episode for the top.
And yet, with “Casino Night,” which is everyone’s favorite episode of The Office, I think it’s
worthwhile. You see Michael
relatively successful outside of the office, you see the entire crew outside
their element (you get a lot of new personality quirks here that would carry
through the series), and finally you get that perfect moment of Jim confessing
his unyielding love for Pam. The
fact that it ended with a kiss and no other details-perfection.
Those are my favorite Office
moments-what are yours? Do you
have a favorite episode?
For more of my favorites: Girls, Pushing Daisies, How I Met Your Mother, Game of Thrones
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