The season premiere is "The Dundies" about the Scranton branch's annual employee awards show/chance for Michael to buy his employees' attention for his wanna-be Johnny Carson act. I like to think of it as a season opener in two ways: obviously that it's the first episode of the second season but also thinking of the first season as kind of a pre-season. The system was still being drawn up, the roles were still being tinkered with, the timing and chemistry wasn't quite worked out. There are some call-backs later in the season to things that happened back in that primordial ooze, but much like with Parks & Rec's first season, or an NFL pre-season, you could watch it but it's more about seeing the potential take shape than be reached. This episode works perfectly as an introduction for those who skipped the pre-season (and most did) but let's get started and talk about that later.
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00:35 - I like how, along with similarly high quality, comic sensibilities, and talent interconnection, there's a through-line of GREAT theme songs running through The Office, 30 Rock, Parks & Recreation, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. It's not crazy to think they could exist in a shared universe, right? If BK99 has an episode about the difficulty of policing a "Leap Day" celebration I will be like pigman in PCU: "THIS IS MY THESIS MAN!"
01:29 - Right away we get one of the five-tool jokes that made the show so great in its prime and were so sorely missed when all the jokes seemed to become "now isn't THIS a wacky situation? Wakka wakka!" Michael is explaining The Dundies in an interview with the documentary crew, and more importantly the importance of The Dundies from his perspective. He describes how un-worthy of awards some of his employees are simply by who they are ("who's going to give Kevin an award? Dunkin' Donuts?") establishing that he's a jerk, that he's shallow, and he has a pretty low opinion of some of his underlings. He's doing this as a service to them ("this is everybody's favorite day") and paints an absurd picture of an employee sharing their Dundie triumph with their neighbor only to have the neighbor hang themselves due to "lack of recognition." So in the first minute we have this dismissive jerk tell this ridiculously over the top, self-congratulatory story about how he's kind-of saving his employees lives with this comedy award show, which also hints at his own fear of going unrecognized when you consider how drastic and over-the-top he envisioned the consequences. Huh? Layers? Remember when this show had layers???01:37 - And almost immediately we get an employee's perspective on "everybody's favorite day" as Pam describes The Dundies as a car crash you want to look away from but can't because your boss is making you watch.
02:49 - Michael takes us on a tour of past Dundies winners, which also serves to help reintroducing characters (first real game after the pre-season, remember?). Starting with Jim who doesn't have his on display (or probably anywhere) but explains to Michael he doesn't display them to avoid getting cocky. Dwight sucks up by revealing his are at home in a display case above his bed, earning a "T.M.I." from Michael. Michael also takes a moment to explain in an interview that he used to say don't go there, but stopped because, "that's lame." I'm sure I could keep listing this stuff for the rest of the time but I guess the main point is the mockumentary format starts to get a bad reputation as a shortcut to plot and character development, since you can just have characters tell plot and character details directly to the audience rather than showing them, but The Office does show them. Rather than following up Michael's T.M.I. with a cut to someone else looking embarrassed, or a talking-head where they say "ugh, it's so pathetic and embarrassing that he talks like that" they take the chance to let Michael further dig his own hole by showing how childish and uncool his idea of cool is.
03:26 - Now that we know Michael thinks The Dundies are "really funny" and that his idea of funny is calling Jim "Fat Halpert" repeatedly in a Fat Albert impression, and that he thinks T.M.I. is cool, newly upgraded slang (we're not even four minutes in by the way), we finally get to see some Dundies action via a tape recording (he has taped every ceremony) that Pam is being forced to watch to find highlights. It's Michael in a tuxedo t-shirt (HA! Bro! Classic!) singing a parody of Lou Bega's "Mambo No. 5" using the names of his female employees that he obviously has NOT written before starting. "A little bit of Paaaam all night longgg, a little bit of Angelaaa on the...thing..." I love this immediate crystallization of Michael as a character. He does things for himself while also letting his imagination run wild to the point that his selfish party is saving lives, he has a shallow and warped "what's hot right now" sense of culture, and to him references and jokes are the same thing. I'm guessing he LOVED the later Scary Movie sequels where it's just people dressed up as momentarily newsworthy people.
05:19 - Somehow I forgot that Michael held a Tsunami Relief FUN-raiser which corporate allowed because they naturally assumed it was a FUNDraiser. Michael does feel like it was worth it as, "people were very affected by the footage." I didn't take into account how bittersweet Michael's wholehearted belief in the Patch Adams "laughter is the best medicine" philosophy would be after the circumstances of Robin Williams's death...but anyway, Michael has lost the company funding for The Dundies because he used up his yearly office party opportunity twice with the fun-raiser and an 05/05/05 party that he defends as coming around "once every billion years!" Combined with his fond memories of Lou Bega I have to think there was a little of the 9/9/99 MTV Video Music Awards hype in there. Plus the yearly "it won't be this date for another hundred years!" events of the naughts.
Something more important here is Michael's reaction when Jan "drops an a-bomb" about the funding being cut off. He immediately leaps up, directs the cameras out of his office, shuts the door, and closes the blinds; even leaving Jan hanging for a moment too long on the phone, prompting her to ask if he's still there. Another way The Office ruled at maximizing the mockumentary format rather than using it as a shortcut was how it dealt with the viewer as a character and visibility. I've written about it before, but the key is that unlike other shows, where the camera is a magic window into private moments, if a character is on-screen they are being watched. Either they know they are, or they can find out that they are. Michael's response here is to hide from everyone. He hides from the documentary crew to hide his agitation and minimize how undercut he just was by his boss, and he hides from his employees because he already promised them more appetizers and now the funding for anything has vanished.
06:05 - I called The Dundies Michael's chance to be a wanna-be Johnny Carson and here he is putting on a turban to do a mind-reader "loosely based on Carnac, one of Carson's classic characters" (aka EXACTLY Carnac). He also reveals a reason he's fretting over the lack of funding: no corporate approval means no open bar which means his audience won't be drunk...enough to tolerate him (is left unsaid).
07:11 - We get our first Jim & Pam moment of the season as she reaches a point in the taped ceremony where Michael hands out the award for "Longest Engagement" which she wins every year due to her fiance Roy's reluctance to set a wedding date. In the video we can see Pam's hurt at the joke at her sorest spot, Roy's insensitive enjoyment of it (his acceptance speech is simply, "we'll see you next year!"), and Jim's frustration at the whole thing. The camera swings around to current-day Pam watching the tape and captures her dread, as tonight she's sure to "win" again, and Jim's shared dread as he watches her from his desk. Jim tries to talk Michael out of the joke, framing the repetition as laziness rather than how it's STOMPING ON BOTH THEIR HEARTS! CAN'T YOU SEE THAT?!?! *Spoiler Alert* Jim & Pam stuff is a good chunk of why I love this season of TV above all others, and seeing how hard they nailed it in a later episode is what got me watching the show after being a fan of the British one who was driven away by the bungled pilot.
10:00 - A brutally awkward part of this episode that I always forget is that the ceremony is taking place in the middle of a Chili's restaurant, with other diners all around with music, comedy sound affects, and Michael's awful jokes being blasted through a speaker system. Yikes.
10:59 - Perhaps no character went off the rails quite like Dwight in later years as he seemed to totally lose touch with reality. While later Dwight became a ridiculous schemer, early Dwight is defined by a devotion to honor, justice, and chain of command. In this episode the B-plot has been about some embarrassing graffiti about Michael on the women's bathroom wall, and his desperate need to read it and punish the vandal (or, barring that, all the women in the office collectively). What made him funniest was his utter, humorless devotion to black and white reality (and how Jim's pranks took advantage of that). Which makes him perfect as the utterly imperfect straight-man for Michael's terrible, hackneyed comedy routines:
Michael: I was out on a very, very hot date last night with a girl from HR, Dwight.12:09 - Almost immediately Roy and Darryl decide if they're going to have to pay for their own drinks they may as well go to a bar that doesn't have Michael performing in it, which seemingly means Pam automatically has to leave too. In the parking lot she angrily ditches Roy, chastising him for not considering what she wanted to do. Does she really want to watch The Dundies? Probably not, considering we know how much she hates the "Longest Engagement" award she's sure to get. Roy even references it as a reason to leave, which is even more insulting since we already saw him proudly guffaw over it in the taped ceremony. So he knows how upset it makes her (and thus how upset his refusal to set a wedding date upsets her) but only cares when he can use it as an excuse to go drinking with his buddy instead of her co-workers. Roy was SUCH a well-drawn piece of garbage without straying into cartoon villainy. You could clearly see why Pam deserves better than him while still having it be subtle enough that she doesn't seem like an idiot. You can understand how she became stuck in this situation, and why an argument in a parking lot isn't going to suddenly make it crumble the way usual dramatic tricks like infidelity might. Anyway, Pam chastises Roy for his insensitivity and stomps back to Chili's, joining Jim at his table.
Dwight: Really? We don't have any girls from HR.
Michael: No, I, that...for the sake of the story. And things were getting hot and heavy!
Dwight: Yeah?
Michael: And I was about to take her bra off.
Dwight: Yeahhhh!
Michael: When she had me fill out six hours worth of paperwork!
Dwight: Like an AIDS test?
12:15 - Oh God, Michael's racist Asian character "Ping." Thankfully Twitter didn't exist yet or we would be living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland after the meltdown these few seconds would have caused.
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17:46 - It's strange how much the transition to emotional stuff in sitcoms has devolved recently. It's not as telegraphed as in the 80s and 90s with the "issue episodes" of sitcoms where a character would turn to the camera and say "okay folks, we've had fun tonight, but I'd like to take a minute to talk to you about rabies," but tonal shifts still come with a sort of "ca-CHUNK" like you can see, hear, and feel the train switching tracks. Here we get the "we're a family" stuff, but from how it actually tends to happen. It's funny how Ed O'Neil is in both Modern Family, which really noisily (and effectively,but noisily) will switch from comedy to emotion for the "we're a family" bits that pop up so often, and he was in Married With Children which had possibly the most subtle "we're a family" transitions of any sitcom. Some outsider would criticize or insult the Bundys and next thing you know their interpersonal venom would align outwards and they'd go on the attack (often literally ending up in a brawl).
Here we get the first attack from outside Dunder-Mifflin, as some townies at the bar (including a conspicuous Apatow-verse cameo regular) hurl insults and then objects at Michael during the awful "Tiny Dancer" parody "Tiny Dundie." Something about Michael that falls away in later seasons is that he will never seek out a reason to stop doing something he wants to do, even if it should be obvious to him, but if one smacks him across the top of the head he will be defeated immediately and takes it hard. Here he effectively cancels the rest of the show, not in a showy huff but with a realization a more tactful person would've had from the start: "I had some more Dundies to give out but I'm just gonna cut it short and wrap it up so people can enjoy their food." He then dejectedly gives Kevin an award commemorating how badly he made the bathroom smell one time. Pam, who has been drinking all night, either to drown her dread over yet again winning "Longest Engagement" or her pain over still being in the longest engagement, shows her care for Michael by showing care for The Dundies as she starts clapping and cheering for Kevin's victory, prompting Jim and the others to join in. She points out that she hasn't gotten a Dundie yet, and Jim says he hasn't either and starts a Dundies chant that allows Michael to "reluctantly" return to hosting from his pit of despair.
After Stanley wins "fine work" and gripes in an acceptance speech (the first of the night) that last year he got "great work," Michael announces that the next award goes to Pam, whose drunken laughter over Stanley's speech immediately seizes into expectant dread. She has won...the "whitest sneakers award!" She gives an exuberant speech, really playing off the award show cliches that Michael tries to lampoon but doesn't understand parody enough to be able to. Everyone applauds and enjoys. She hugs Michael and kisses him on the cheek, and returns to the table where she hugs Jim and kisses him...on the lips. Again, SO MUCH of this show isn't just what's happening but that it's happening with other people watching. All their co-workers in the background hit various levels of "woahhhh" and Jim awkwardly walks back around the table to his seat with a struggling mixture of "wish the BEST MOMENT of my LIFE didn't just take place in front of EVERYONE."
18:06 - Just need to mention that Jenna Fischer's drunk acting where she's just sitting there staring at Jim and over-nodding as he talks to the camera is amazing. Also, fun-fact, we learn in a talking-head with the Chili's manager that she is now banned for life from Chili's for sneaking drinks off other people's tables to get around serving limits. A pity there'll never be a scene where she, Jim, and the kids are on a family road trip and desperate for somewhere to stop for food but the only places they can find are all Chili's.
20:23 - Here at the end, Jim is sitting with Pam while she waits for Angela to give her a ride home. Pam reveals (to us) that she wrote the graffiti about Michael in the women's room and she feels bad, but laughs in agreement when Jim say no she doesn't. Sure she stepped in to save Michael's feelings when he was heckled by outsiders, but he's still the oblivious jerk of a boss who pressed on the bruise of her engagement and made her watch tapes of his bad jokes all day before watching them live that night. Angela's car eventually arrives and Jim walks Pam toward the passenger door, before Pam stops him. "Hey, um, can I ask you a question?" before looking towards the camera and following up with, "I just wanted to say thanks."
Maybe the fact that I study interaction is why I love this show so much. It's pretty common in sitcoms for coincidence and contrivances to act as the antagonist. Everything is strained misunderstandings and eventually The Office has it's share of them (especially with Jim & Pam). In season 2 though the "big bad" tends to be context. Pam abandons her question (and every time it kills me not to hear what it was) because they are on camera. She doesn't chicken out, or hold back for drama's sake. Even though her shyness has gone with her sobriety (which is what allowed her to rescue Michael) she still knows whatever she was going to ask should be asked in private, and they don't get to have that privacy with their relationship being an office friendship. Throughout the season we'll see moments where what holds them apart is understanding rather than misunderstanding, avoiding the usual "oh COME ON you IDIOTS!" frustration that comes with watching characters think and act like characters, living lives where nothing can be solved before the finale and behavior has to follow the plot rather than logic.
I doubt every post in his re-watch will be THIS massive. I just had a lot of pent up feelings about what made this show so great I guess. Hopefully it was somewhat interesting. Usually I give things the thumbs up/down ratings of my TiVo but I feel too close to this material to rate it (plus Netflix uses five stars rather than three thumbs). So I'm going to try and rank them, even just out of my own curiosity for where things end up. Congrats to "The Dundies" for shooting right to #1!
=Rankings=
#1: Episode 1 - The Dundies
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