TV #57 of 2020: The Office, season 9 This final season recovers substantially from the weaker entries that it follows, and improves further as it approaches the catharsis of the series ending. At the end of the day I still don’t know if I can say that it’s great — this is, after all, the …
Tag Archives: rewatch
TV Review: The Office, season 8
TV #54 of 2020: The Office, season 8 The first stretch of this show without original star Steve Carell is a real mess, immediately confirming that the producers had no idea who would be taking over for his character as branch manager when they ended the previous season on that cliffhanger of interviews. And that’s …
TV Review: The Office, season 7
TV #51 of 2020: The Office, season 7 Theoretically I suppose a modern audience could approach this year of The Office not knowing it was Steve Carell’s last, but since it was crafted by the writers and understood by contemporary viewers as such, I think that remains the key lens with which to consider it. …
TV Review: The Office, season 6
TV #49 of 2020: The Office, season 6 Although not as impressively serialized as the previous season’s arc with the Michael Scott Paper Company, this year of The Office takes a few swings at tinkering with the status quo, first with the promotion of one of the characters to co-manager and then with the corporate …
TV Review: The Office, season 5
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 …
Movie Review: The Princess Bride
Movie #13 of 2020: The Princess Bride (1987) This beloved film lives up to my memories and its own reputation, offering thrills, laughs, and emotional stirrings in equal measure. (I legitimately teared up at the last scene tonight, perhaps because my wife and I have each lost a grandfather this year.) It’s a feel-good movie …
TV Review: The Office, season 4
TV #42 of 2020: The Office, season 4 This is a deceptively light season of the classic workplace sitcom, with few of the plot shake-ups that have marked previous years. But there is still the structure of Ryan’s time at corporate bookending this particular run, and some new romantic developments offer intriguing forward momentum that …
TV Review: The Good Wife, season 7
TV #41 of 2020: The Good Wife, season 7 The penultimate run of this legal drama petered out by the end, but this final year is somehow another big step down. On a scene-by-scene basis The Good Wife continues to bear a surface resemblance to the show it used to be, but the characterizations and …
TV Review: The Office, season 3
TV #40 of 2020: The Office, season 3 Another strong year for this classic workplace sitcom, delivering laughs that largely still stand up today and fun new developments to long-term character dynamics. If I have one complaint about this stretch of the series, it’s that it ends up feeling far less daring than it begins: …
TV Review: The Office, season 2
TV #38 of 2020: The Office, season 2 There may be better individual seasons of television than this, but I can’t think of another program that improves so much from its first year to its second (except maybe The Office’s spiritual descendant Parks and Recreation). The tweaks to the cringe-humor formula inherited from this show’s …
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 