Salute Your Shorts: The Office Webisodes

Salute Your Shorts is a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any other short form visual media that generally gets ignored.

Even the studios stopped denying several years back that television’s not doing so hot. Having atrophied viewership due to the internet and video games, the medium’s no longer the one stop free-entertainment shop it used to be, meaning that if people in the industry want to keep their jobs, they’d best think up ways to tap into these newfound interwebs to keep their advertising from drying up completely.

Since that realization, a lot of new ideas to create synergy between the internet or games and TV have come out, most of them pretty bad. A lot of these go generally ignored by the public because, well, they’re terrible ideas—every time a show tells you to visit its website for an assuredly lousy flash game, for instance, that’s one of these bad ideas in action. But one idea that seems to have stuck, at least in a few cases, is webisodes, and few shows have made more webisodes than The Office, which began them early on and continues chugging them out regardless of the strikes they’ve caused.

Not that the idea of webisodes seems particularly awful. Since summers are the off-season for television, what better way is there to keep viewer interest than to throw them a bone between seasons and remind them of why they should return for the show in the fall? No one has a shorter attention span than the American public, so network fears are more or less justified. Plus, it allowed some early experimentation in taking grabbing some of that sweet, sweet, largely non-existent web advertising they’d been hearing so much about. Since the web is really about two-minute time spans anyhow, why not make the web-exclusive content super short?

With these points in mind, The Office released one of the earliest network-funded web spinoffs, “The Accountants,” which (kind of) cut a roughly 20-minute long episode thing into 10 more-easily-digestible two-minute chunks. Rolled out from July 13-Sept. 7, the series focuses on several of the show’s minor characters, the accountants, and what they go through when $3,000 is missing from their ledgers. Although “The Accountants” is by far the lengthiest web series The Office has rolled out so far, its successors have followed pretty much the same pattern and in some ways aren’t too distinguishable from one another.

It’s hard not to feel pretty mixed about the show’s webisodes. Arriving at just about the point of impatience between seasons, they do manage to fill a certain comedic empty spot that develops when the only things new on TV are reality and game shows. And they are funny, especially “The Accountants” and “Blackmail,” which tap directly into The Office’s patented awkwardly confrontational humor and deliver more of the series’ traditional yucks.

But there’s also something a little bit empty about the webisodes, especially when they’re held up to the standards of their full-length counterparts. A two or three minute run time simply doesn’t allow for more than a simple joke set up/joke delivery format, and while they’re often written just as well as television jokes, these small bites are strangely unfulfilling. Because they don’t really lead anywhere besides to the next set piece, they don’t have the sort of dramatic connection to characters that usually typifies the series…which in turn makes them less funny. Situations just can’t build to the levels of absurdity offered by a longer running time.

What also takes them down a notch is that, unlike in the main show, there’s nothing at stake. The Office isn’t a Seth MacFarlane comedy; there are real (well, real-feeling) emotions at stake and lives ruined which keeps the show’s humor in line with its darkly realistic tone. The American series has never taken that as far as the British one, but even so the show’s continuity is a key to its identity. The webisodes strip this out by effectively removing themselves from the show’s canon, since nothing in them is ever referenced or even seen to exist in the main series. Like a Simpsons episode, everything will return to normal again, and while there’s certainly nothing wrong with that, it means that one of the most important aspects of the show, and its humor, are completely missing.

Which seems at odds with the webisodes one real strength, but regardless, doesn’t contradict it: The webisodes deepen The Office’s supporting characters. No, nothing they do in the webisodes will change them, nor will their actions have any real effect on the show, but featuring them does continue to develop these characters. Even though it’s arguable that at this point none of even the supporting characters need help being defined, the webisodes help keep them in mind for new viewers and allow their traits to take center stage over the show’s stars. While not particularly looking forward to this year’s crop of shorts, I still eagerly awaited each short after Creed was given the lead for the 2009 series.

For The Office, the webisodes end up a mixed blessing. They’re certainly better than nothing at all, and definitely not bad by any stretch of the imagination. But they’re also not nearly as good as having another episode of the show and are by no means necessary viewing for anyone except diehard fans. Stil, as far as webisodes conjoined with TV shows go, they’re definitely one of the best out there.