TV #46 of 2020:
The Office, season 5
Sitcoms have a tendency to grow stale and repetitive the longer they air, but the better ones find ways to gradually tweak their storytelling dynamics over time. This era of The Office is an excellent example of that, regularly spooling out developments that shake up the status quo and add significant complications into the characters’ personal histories, rather than being immediately forgotten and reset. At the beginning of the year, Michael is flirting with Holly, Andy is engaged to Angela, Phyllis has blackmailed her way into chairing the Party Planning Committee, and Pam is away at art school in New York. Those situations all shift and grow over the following episodes, which are enjoyable as individual half-hours of entertainment yet also demonstrate the care for unfolding plotlines that some of the writers and producers would later bring to projects like The Good Place, Parks and Recreation, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
One major arc late in the season is probably about as serialized as this program ever gets, and it’s honestly so strong that I almost wish the show had fully embraced that as a model going forward. It may make it harder for casual viewers to miss an episode here and there (or catch a random one out of sequence) and still enjoy everything, but in an age of easy streaming and bingeing, watching the series build on itself over the course of this run is a uniquely electrifying experience.
★★★★★
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