No, I’m not gonna whine about The Office “jumping the shark,” because it clearly hasn’t, and I’m not gonna chalk up the recent episodes’ weirdness to some fundamental change in the show’s quality as opposed to just some unusal individual episodes with a bunch of funny lines (“I’d never say this to her face, but Pam is a great person and a very talented artist.”) That being said, over the course of this month, I continue to find myself enjoying watching 30 Rock a lot more than watching The Office week after week.
The main reason, I feel, is that there’s a certain stigma associated with The Office — which is much stronger when you work at a place like BWE where your colleague will get blasted for not writing an evaluation of the half-hour comedy before 12 pm — where when I go into an episode, I’m always wondering, what are they gonna do with Michael this week? What’s gonna happen with Jim & Pam? Are Ryan and Jan and Toby going to remain completely insane? Will there be a huge plot twist? What if Michael really did fire Stanley, how would that affect the fabric of the show? And so on. Yes, it’s dorky, but a show with such uniquely strong characters demands this relationship from its regular viewers, and I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume soooommmme of our readers feel the same way.
30 Rock, on the other hand, is always innocuous, positive, and guaranteed to have about 10 ridiculous sentences that no humans have ever thought to construct before. I can watch the show knowing I’m not gonna have to form a conscious opinion of every episode for when I inevitably get pulled into postgame conversations on Friday. No one at work is gonna ask me, “do you think the producers are gonna have Liz and Floyd get together in the season finale? What would happen if they moved to Cleveland for a couple episodes, how would that affect the Jack plot??”
It certainly doesn’t hurt that the last ten or so episodes of 30 Rock have been exceptionally stellar — there’s rarely a minute in the show that isn’t either laugh-out-loud funny or just flat-out ridiculous, with its absurdity perhaps shielding it from the super-serious character investment that The Office basically required of its fans once the third season got going. Not saying the characters on 30 Rock are any less defined or likeable, but there’s never a sense that the humor will ever take a backseat to the everyday drama. This isn’t a flaw in The Office — in fact, the relationships between the characters and the ongoing potential for meaningful plot moments may be the show’s greatest and most defining characteristic — but it also ensures, at least for the time being, that I’m never going to be able to watch an episode without knowing that I’m gonna be having a conversation about it the next day.
I’d never say 30 Rock is “better” than The Office now or vice-versa; I always hate when people say things like “I think Colbert’s way better than The Daily Show,” as though we gain anything by quantifying and ranking comparable comedies. But that being said, I can no longer deny to myself that I’m laughing out loud more often at a different NBC half-hour these days.
Perhaps the most telling sign of all — I used to watch 30 Rock on my DVR first, then gear up for the weekly Office episode. Now, 30 Rock headlines.
There. Said it. Everyone else is invited to come clean in the comments.
