Thanks, I Hate It: The Office

I hate The Office with a pure frustration usually reserved for pop-up ads and those smug door-to-door evangelists who are just so insufferably certain they've got all the answers. I hate it like I hate having dry skin in the small of my back during the winter, or an itch on the bottom of my foot. Its chirpy, abrasive brand of humor is bad enough on its own, but its insistence on parlaying that sandpaper approach into endlessly prolonged sentimentality results in a show that rubs a cheese grater against your cheek before kissing it. It has no awareness of its own mean-spirited pettiness and nothing of the original series' pitch-black cynicism, the dollop of nastiness that made its brutal cringe comedy worthwhile.

The show's mockumentary format is quickly discarded, though it hangs around in the background as a kind of halfhearted running gag. The flatly cruel objectivity of the documentary is incompatible with the show's goals of nurturing investment in a boring retread of much better will-they-won't-they romances like Sam and Diane's chaotic and adversarial courtship on Cheers. The characters on The Office are a wilted salad of straight-faced sarcasm dispensers (Toby, Jim, Oscar, Phyllis, Stanley) and obnoxious, self-important morons (Kelly, Michael, Dwight, Andy). None of this ever changes in spite of the shaky-cam's desperate attempts to bleed into dramedy and away from multi-camera soundstage comedy. 

Beyond this point there is no substance to the show, and thus nothing to analyze but the performances which people it. I will thus rank each worker in the titular office (the ones I can remember, anyway) by how much I despise them.

1. Kelly. Kelly is repulsive and sociopathic. I admire her purity of spirit.

2. Stanley. He is a basically relatable man. He hates his job and dislikes his coworkers. He has a good flat affect.

3. Pam. She's not really consistent as a character, but she gets knocked around some in life and is disrespected by the others. There's something to that.

4. Oscar. Oscar is gay.   

5. Phyllis. Her smugness is repellent to me. What are you smirking at, Phyllis? 

6. Angela. She owns cats and is a prude. Imagine if Hot Lips from M*A*S*H had no personality.

7. Dwight. The joke with Dwight is that while he is absurd, he takes himself very seriously. This is also the joke with Kelly, and with Angela, and with Michael, and presumably with some others I have forgotten.

8. Jim. Fuck Jim. He's too conventionally good-looking to be relatable, and his deadpan glances at the camera are his only joke apart from elaborate pranks which betray nothing but the hollowness of his soul and his need to feed like a biting insect on the aggravation of others.

9. Michael. An infuriating idiot whose bottomless stupidity leads nowhere but deeper into itself. He is in charge because that is the funniest place he could be. Why are his superiors portrayed as reasonable people? Why do his subordinates love him and treat him with tenderness? He should be led to the guillotine.

10. Andy. Ed Helms is the enemy of my life. When he opens his big sharp Chiclet-filled mouth I want to punch his face until my fist comes out the back of his head. His smile is like razor blades on a chalkboard inside my skull. When I close my eyes I dream of his agony. 

Are there more employees? Doubtlessly. They ebb and flow with each season in a tide of writhing meat, romancing each other and committing egregious faux pas. They remain at a dismal paper company as though trapped in limbo, pairing off two by two to vanish into the churning nether realm of offscreen emotional fulfillment. The show is bile in the back of your throat. It is a disease.