As we all have been, I'm sure, during this quarantine, I spent a good chunk of the past four months watching television (and movies, but you knew that), including The Office. I had not seen The Office in at least three years fully through, and honestly I wouldn't be surprised if it was longer than that, and admittedly I didn't see it fully through again this time. I hate Season 8 of The Office, and the Season 7 episodes that don't involve Michael Scott, and so once again I skipped over them, finishing off with Season 9 and the fond farewells it includes.
The Office is one of my favorite television series. I did watch it when it was originally on, though I didn't start watching it until the beginning of Season 4 live. I had just started a job at an actual office, and everyone there watched the show, and The Office felt like an easier thing to get into than The Bachelor or The Hills, which were the other two shows that everyone was discussing ad nauseum at the time. It was a really lovely show-once the series got off of its need to emulate the cruelty of the original British comedy, and add heart to the Michael Scott character (which I know some people consider a flaw in this show, but I think it's a vast improvement as mean Michael Scott would have been insufferable for multiple seasons), it was truly moving, and once the show realized its best asset wasn't Michael, but in fact Jenna Fischer's Pam (which it forgets for periods, but during its finest moments like Seasons 3, 5, and 9, puts front-and-center), it hit another level. The Office sits proudly on my Top 10 favorite television show lists.
And yet, when watching it again, I realized that like most shows that run this long, there are long stretches of The Office where you are expected to continue your love more because you adore the characters & have invested so much time in them than because the show is earning your adoration. The Office is better than most television, but that doesn't mean that it didn't suffer from serious repetition & quality dips, even during the Carell years. Both Season 4 and Season 6 it feels like the show was biding its time, unable to decide what to do with Michael in terms of growth, and unsure of how to handle a happy Jim-and-Pam (happy characters admittedly being some of the hardest to write compelling narratives around). You didn't feel this when it was new, but even though I love it, I can tell you that it feels that way on repeat-you can tell for long stretches that the narrative, the moments you really want to get to, are surrounded by filler-it's not a particularly tight show.
This is, of course, why I love movies more than television, something I've never been shy about. Movies are finite, they are almost always meant to be contained within one story (or at the very least, what we'd constitute as "one season" of television), and with that lack of time comes risks of something other than "happily ever after," giving them higher stakes. Movies don't need to meander, and they don't need to pull themselves like taffy in order to hit 100 episodes or seven seasons. While television has more room for story, more room for character growth, and more room for a complicated, longer narrative (all things I love, and what attracts me to a novel), it almost never takes advantage of that.
Which is why it still shocks me after all of these years that I do, at the end of the day, love a TV show far more than I've ever loved any movie or book. If you know me at all, you know I cannot make it through a conversation about television without bringing up Lost. I recently also re-watched this, for the first time in at least four years (it could be five, as the main thing I remember about my last viewing of this is that my boyfriend I was watching it with dumped me before Ben showed up). I have watched Lost fully through at least three times other than the initial viewings of the series, and the first five seasons I watched an additional time headed into Season 6. This is a show that a lot of fans have a lot of problems with, and honestly, considering how much television and movies I've seen in the past few years (and how Game of Thrones had come to compete for the title of "my favorite show" in a way no show had since Lost went off the air), I was curious if it'd hold up. But, weirdly enough, it just gets better.
Ten years after it went off the air, I still get chills when Charlie says "where are we?" I still pause at the map in the Hatch to look at the drawings on the wall. I still keep a list of mysteries I can't remember the ending to, and have "a-ha!" moments when they are solved seasons later. I still weep openly at every major character death...this time, because of the loneliness of the quarantine as I started this when the stress of being alone was at its worst for me, I literally balled during the opening scenes I was so happy to see old friends in my home again. Because I limit myself to only watching once every three years or so, I don't know the show by heart, and so it doesn't have the reflective "I know exactly what's about to be said" feeling that, say, Bob's Burgers does for me.
Lost does occasionally suffer from repetition problems, specifically in the first half of the third season. This was when the creators were negotiating for an end to the series, and were starting to run short on ways to extend what was happening in flashbacks, but Lost had a secret weapon that other shows don't-it arguably had too many story opportunities going on on the island at the time that made up for the fact that the well was getting weak in backstory (with the most-cited example of this being the "Jack's Tattoos" storyline in Stranger in a Strange Land), and with the exception of the Writer's Strike episodes of Season 4 (which feel a tad bit rushed and like the 3-4 more episodes they'd been contracted to get might have fleshed out some backstory on the Kahana crew), it doesn't get overwhelmed by this task.
I found on this viewing, this might be the principle reason that I love Lost more than I love any other show or movie-it's brimming with plot, most of which (despite fanboy protestations) has answers, even if they aren't transparent ones, and you find those stories in repeat viewings. This cycle, a lot of my attention kept being drawn to the geography of the Island, specifically during Season 5 when we see the Others & the Dharma Initiative battling over its secrets, both not understanding them in different ways. It's intriguing to watch longtime residents of the island like Ben Linus & Charles Widmore continually reveal how many secrets they don't know about the place, and how so much of their character arcs are about curiosity-not just about mining the Island for their own power trips, but also a thirst for knowledge; their need to know more drives them to constantly "have to go back." That the show is structured so that you discover more and more each viewing, rather than continually seeing the flaws even in things you love (despite themselves) is the show's genius.
I have not revisited Mad Men, The Leftovers, or Game of Thrones yet this quarantine, arguably the three shows that might come closest to this (though the trio, perhaps weary of a similar criticism of Lost, left very little ambiguity in the final chapters of their final season), but I think that that's what's missing in a lot of modern television, and why the "Golden Age" hit its peak in roughly 2010-12 with shows like Lost, Mad Men, and Game of Thrones, and why it's probably over until someone can either recapture this magic or find something new to say with the medium. Since it's my birthday, I'll invite you to join me in the comments and share why you love your favorite TV series (one that you've seen through a couple of times), and what shows currently on right now come the closest to capturing what made that series so special & magic.
This is, of course, why I love movies more than television, something I've never been shy about. Movies are finite, they are almost always meant to be contained within one story (or at the very least, what we'd constitute as "one season" of television), and with that lack of time comes risks of something other than "happily ever after," giving them higher stakes. Movies don't need to meander, and they don't need to pull themselves like taffy in order to hit 100 episodes or seven seasons. While television has more room for story, more room for character growth, and more room for a complicated, longer narrative (all things I love, and what attracts me to a novel), it almost never takes advantage of that.
Ten years after it went off the air, I still get chills when Charlie says "where are we?" I still pause at the map in the Hatch to look at the drawings on the wall. I still keep a list of mysteries I can't remember the ending to, and have "a-ha!" moments when they are solved seasons later. I still weep openly at every major character death...this time, because of the loneliness of the quarantine as I started this when the stress of being alone was at its worst for me, I literally balled during the opening scenes I was so happy to see old friends in my home again. Because I limit myself to only watching once every three years or so, I don't know the show by heart, and so it doesn't have the reflective "I know exactly what's about to be said" feeling that, say, Bob's Burgers does for me.
Lost does occasionally suffer from repetition problems, specifically in the first half of the third season. This was when the creators were negotiating for an end to the series, and were starting to run short on ways to extend what was happening in flashbacks, but Lost had a secret weapon that other shows don't-it arguably had too many story opportunities going on on the island at the time that made up for the fact that the well was getting weak in backstory (with the most-cited example of this being the "Jack's Tattoos" storyline in Stranger in a Strange Land), and with the exception of the Writer's Strike episodes of Season 4 (which feel a tad bit rushed and like the 3-4 more episodes they'd been contracted to get might have fleshed out some backstory on the Kahana crew), it doesn't get overwhelmed by this task.
I found on this viewing, this might be the principle reason that I love Lost more than I love any other show or movie-it's brimming with plot, most of which (despite fanboy protestations) has answers, even if they aren't transparent ones, and you find those stories in repeat viewings. This cycle, a lot of my attention kept being drawn to the geography of the Island, specifically during Season 5 when we see the Others & the Dharma Initiative battling over its secrets, both not understanding them in different ways. It's intriguing to watch longtime residents of the island like Ben Linus & Charles Widmore continually reveal how many secrets they don't know about the place, and how so much of their character arcs are about curiosity-not just about mining the Island for their own power trips, but also a thirst for knowledge; their need to know more drives them to constantly "have to go back." That the show is structured so that you discover more and more each viewing, rather than continually seeing the flaws even in things you love (despite themselves) is the show's genius.
I have not revisited Mad Men, The Leftovers, or Game of Thrones yet this quarantine, arguably the three shows that might come closest to this (though the trio, perhaps weary of a similar criticism of Lost, left very little ambiguity in the final chapters of their final season), but I think that that's what's missing in a lot of modern television, and why the "Golden Age" hit its peak in roughly 2010-12 with shows like Lost, Mad Men, and Game of Thrones, and why it's probably over until someone can either recapture this magic or find something new to say with the medium. Since it's my birthday, I'll invite you to join me in the comments and share why you love your favorite TV series (one that you've seen through a couple of times), and what shows currently on right now come the closest to capturing what made that series so special & magic.
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