Steve Carell appeared momentarily in Thursday’s farewell season episode of “The Office,” but only as part of the clips that served as the trailer to the upcoming TV documentary series, finally coming out, over nine nights in May, we are told, on WVIA, actual call letters of the local PBS station in Scranton.
They must have some big donors to the PBS station there! Because the docu-series that is being called “The Office: An American Workplace” has been shooting for 10 years, making it one of the most expensive documentaries ever made.
Part of wrapping up the comedy series “The Office” this spring on NBC is bringing the documentary to an end and now having the cast react to the scenes that have been shot and they are seeing for the first time.
Those reactions were part of an odd, unsuccessful episode that also included remnants of the oddball failed spinoff, “The Farm” involving Dwight and the farmer’s daughter he’s dating, a weird Ryan Howard scene in the Philly office with Jim and Darryl, and Pam further showing her doubts about Jim to the returning Brian, the documentary camera man who first showed his face earlier this season and has some attraction to Pam (having saved her with a boom microphone from an avenging guy in the warehouse who defaced her mural).
The episode that began with Phyllis having to be doused with cold water because listening to “50 Shades of Grey” was putting her in a bliss zone uncomfortable to others (the bit ends with Andy also listening to the audio book he confiscated, only to be doused himself).
But attention soon turned to another piece of shared pop culture — a trailer online for “The Office” documentary that had mesmerized everyone — at first.
Then Andy started to obsess about the negative comments on the site about him (and it was Nellie, it turned out, who was writing them as quickly as he could post his defense).
Oscar and Angela both started to worry about what would be revealed affecting the Senator of their affection: He’d be outed and her affair with Dwight would be revealed (they come clean to him in a funny, shared voice message).
Stanley also worried about his wife finding out about affairs (he called and told her they’d have to not have the TV on for a couple of months). Erin wonders if someone saw her grab from the candy jar with dirty hands.
Workers talk Pam into talking with one of the documentary team, Brian, because they got along so well, to ask him how much of the personal stuff they didn’t know was being shot would be part of the documentary.
Along the way Pam asks him if he thinks Jim had changed — Brian had been observing them all these years, after all. But ultimately she’s dazed by his answer to the filming question. “So basically we had no privacy for 10 years?” she asks.
It’s a little strange that so much time will be spent on the effect of the film of “The Office” being completed. While documentary style was still quite new when the sitcom began in England (there, a follow-up special showed its odd office manager David Brent showing how he used the fame he got after his documentary aired), there are a number of documentary-style comedies now that don’t need explanation — or a finished documentary at the end. Does anybody think there’s going to be a Modern Family documentary completed, for example?
At any rate, the meta matters of a real public TV version of The Office (and a promo that promises, “The Loves..The Lives…The Paper…”) was more amusing than the side stories on the episode.
That Dwight brought his girlfriend to Esther to Dunder-Mifflin because her dad wants him to go in half on a new tractor was an unfortunate leftover from “The Farm” spinoff failure last time. There was nothing too funny about it, except that as Dwight’s sidekick, Clark Duke (who plays a guy also named Clark) seems to be having a good time. He adds life to a show that seems to get more lifeless by the week.
Worst was the Philly sports promotion office of Jim (and Darryl) and their work with the Phillies first baseman, who calls himself K-Fresh and forced the others to read a bad script he wrote.
In the use of sports figures as guest stars and dead end plot devices, The Office is starting to resemble Go On, the Matthew Perry vehicle which conveniently followed in its new time slot.