The Season

I remember the first episode I saw of the NBC version of The Office. It was their season 2 Christmas episode, and I was in Los Angeles, refusing to go outside, as I often felt the need to do in Los Angeles, and I found myself stuck to the hour of comedy that was My Name Is Earl and The Office - first, because nothing else was on, later, because each was so funny.

But The Office wasn't just funny. The thing that caught my attention was one of the fake interview scenes between Jim (John Krasinski) and Pam (Jenna Fischer) - the two simply talked, laughing at each other in spots, but mostly, they spoke like human beings, two voices of reason in a ridiculous environment. I didn't know Jim and Pam would become the driving "drama" of the comedy, the couple that I and its entire audience would root for, propelling The Office beyond its "is it as good as the UK version" talk to the forefront of American comedy, and eventually winning the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series. That was what made The Office such an addiction, and such a treat - it was hilarious, sure, but it was also just so average - you were giddy at the coworkers who wouldn't shut up about their banal weekend plans and love interests, the silently judgmental coworkers, the thin acknowledgment of secret lives, of working a job that, it was barely a secret, no one gave much of a rat's ass about.

That's The Office I love. The Office NBC has trotted out this season is some through-the-looking-glass joke, Reno 911 does Caroline In The City. It might be a plot line of Pam getting especially inspiration at the funeral of a bird, or, Dwight (Rainn Wilson) staging a coup and Michael (the star Steve Carrell) weirdly seeking revenge, or - god almighty - Dwight training new salesman Ryan (BJ Novak) to sniff fertilizer (seriously), but eventually, the rest of its audience might have to start saying, "well, that never happened at any job I worked at."

No, it didn't. The Office this season has been wildly off the mark, but it's still funny sometimes, and its failure - and it is a failure, the rest of the world will say so soon enough if it doesn't improve - is indicative of a TV season that seems all talk. Those hit dramedies that are returning - Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy - seem to be hits only on the distant memory of good episodes past, and the new slate of wild, kooky shows were pronounced failures before September ended - one of the strangest offenders, Tina Fey's backstage comedy 30 Rock is so strangely awful that even its inclusion of big talent in its cast (Alec Baldwin and Tracy Morgan, in funny performances) can't give you the sense that you're actually watching anything.

I wanted to love The Office this year, though - wanted to organize groups around watching it. Worse, I wanted to love that notoriously hyped-and-underperforming other backstage drama, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. In my last blog, I wrote of it, "It occurs to me I don't actually like Studio 60. In fact, I actually don't like Studio 60, but I believe in it." This is true still - I remember hating the first slew of West Wing episodes, but what The West Wing had that counters Studio 60 was a surprise in its cast - its big name stars (big name for TV, that is - Rob Lowe, Moira Kelly, Martin Sheen) were its weakest links, and its more unknowns (John Spencer, Allison Janney, Bradley Whitford, Richard Schiff, Janel Maloney, Dule Hill) each stole their respective scenes. On Studio 60, the cast, besides a brilliant Matthew Perry, might as well all disappear into their LA backlots, and I can't imagine anyone would notice that Perry would be simply talking to himself.

It's because Studio 60 is full of ideas - about television, about the morality of art, ideas about passion, ideas about ideas - that people seem stunned as to how little it seems to resemble an actual world with actual celebrities. The West Wing by comparison should have been more oblique, more tangential inside a liberal la la land that would never exist, but that thought never crossed my mind during The West Wing. That I'm not watching any world I know crosses my mind all the time during Studio 60; it is a fantasy of television masquerading as loquacious reality.

I doubt Studio 60 will make it out of the season, at this point, and maybe that's for the better. I already need a new thing to care about in television, something to come home to. For me, that show on network TV this season has been, strangely, My Name Is Earl, that other NBC comedy whose loopiness this season has only revealed the gifts of its supporting cast. It is still too sermonizing, too pat, and often not funny enough to justify it. But what it never does is play something it's not - a joke on reality, or reality as a joke. It is, mostly, pretty clever, which is its own accomplishment.