The Office: “Finale” (Episode 9.25)

It can hardly be overstated how good The Office’s final season has been, especially in light of what came before it. The Office had always been an inconsistent show, but when its star Steve Carrell left, it had already been in a rut for a while, and NBC’s decision to keep its signature show around on life support led to dreadful episodes and a show that had lost its identity. The Office was, for a season, no longer really about anything, and the puttering around of formerly minor characters took center stage in a sitcom without any sort of pathos.
Greg Daniels’ return to The Office has been extraordinary, not because he returned the show to its former quality but because he did so while turning it into something else entirely. The show’s faux cinema verite style became meaningless so long ago, with rise of so many other popular single camera sitcoms with confessionals, that The Office’s fiction of a documentary filming crew was rarely brought up. Sure, they peeked in occasionally, but this was almost always jarring and usually just a heavy-handed reminder of the style. In season nine, though, they were foregrounded. The crew and the drama they created made for a very different show, one that couldn’t have existed early on. The Office was no longer solely about how these supposedly average characters lived their lives; now it was about how the filmmaking affected their lives. In season nine, the entire cast felt more real and the stakes no longer felt like those of a sit-com. Suddenly, for the first time in the show’s history, it did feel like a documentary, as it was never clear that things would have a happy, sitcom resolution.
That being said, The Office’s finale brought things back to the cast, despite the premise that it takes place one year later and involves a Q&A scene ostensibly done for the DVD extras on the PBS show (I was never clear as to whether this was supposed to be exactly the show we watched, or something else). This offers up a new, third situation for them to cope with—how the show airing affected their lives—and we get to see how this played out. What’s surprising may be the way it doesn’t feel like a year went by for those who stayed in the office, more like a few weeks, so it’s a bit convenient, though no less clever a premise.
For all the talk beforehand about the show airing and the cast responding to it, that was actually a very minor, though excellent, part of “Finale.” The Q&A ended up feeling a lot like the many town hall meetings in Daniels’ other show, Parks & Recreation, with its line of idiots holding a microphone. But even in this scene, it’s clear what The Office is doing: giving every one of its characters a happy ending. Erin is finally reunited with her birth parents, and they leave together in utter bliss. It’s almost too happy and too contrived… but then again, oh well. That’s what the show is trying for, and the question is more whether those beats feel “real,” and here, as with almost everywhere else, it does. I managed to take some issue with the way literally everyone got their greatest wish fulfilled, but then, I’m a bitter crank.