The Office as a School Series

 Spoilers for The Office

The Office is the best depiction of school I’ve seen on TV.

Source: whatculture.com

    People have come up with several different explanations as to why The Office became so popular with young people who’ve never worked in an office. I figured it was because The Office was a good show with well-made characters, and anyone could appreciate that. But an idea crept into my mind that the setting and format of this series really resembled a school. And apparently I’m not the only one. Brian Baumgartner, who played Kevin, mentioned that he and writer Michael Schur came to that same conclusion:

It’s been a question, why are the kids so into it? Like, why are there twelve year olds coming up to me, and saying all of these lines to me, like why is this happening? And we thought … I think what we truly weren’t thinking about, were the similarities between an unreasonable boss, who makes his employees do unreasonable things, sitting next to people you don’t want to sit next to year after year, is so similar to an unreasonable teacher, making you do unreasonable things as students, sitting next to the same group of people year after year, that being stuck in school and being stuck in an office, really resonates with people.

(Source)

    I think this quote captures how school fosters the same sorts of interactions we see in The Office. But I don’t think the similarities even end there.

    I’ve been working on a series of novels set in a school, and in writing them I’ve looked a lot at The Office to see how it makes that kind of setting work. In this post, I want to discuss a few elements that The Office has in common with school settings, and how the show uses those elements to make itself more resonant and relatable.

Source: wikimedia.org

Diverse Characters

    The Office, like a school, is a place where people who would rather be somewhere else share the same space and are forced to interact. We’ve all been in a group project with someone outside of our social circle, just like Jim Halpert often has to collaborate with someone like Dwight.

    Grade school puts you with people you wouldn’t normally hang out with perhaps more than any other time in life. In college, for instance, you spend a lot of time with people with the same major as you, with whom you share an interest in that thing. Even in a real-life workplace, people might share a specialized skill or a common background that led them to that job. The employees of Dunder Mifflin didn’t really choose to work in that specific place, with that specific set of coworkers.

    The many sitcoms based around families or friend groups can only have so much diversity within their ensembles. You couldn’t put Dwight in the Friends cast, because it wouldn’t make sense for them to hang out with him. In a family-centric sitcom, everyone knows each other’s pasts. They’ve lived with each other for a while, so they should have acclimated to each other and adopted the same quirks.

Source: Reddit.com

    

    In The Office, characters come into contact with others who have different norms from them. What Meredith considers normal differs significantly from someone like Erin. These norms generally come from the characters’ different backgrounds. Andy, for example, comes from a bourgeois world of golfing and sailing, while characters like Michael came from less money. Ryan came to the office as a temp in business school, Andy came through a merger, and other characters have worked there for much longer. As a kid in school, you’re often surprised by the different backgrounds your classmates have. It might come as a shock that your friend isn’t allowed to play videogames on the weekend or that they used to live in a different state.

Humor Through Character

    Because these characters act so differently, The Office can wring humor out of characters just being themselves, with little self-awareness. The jokes rise out of the characters rather than forced comedic bits. The way writer/Ryan actor B.J. Novak describes it is:

One time, you know, I wrote a bunch of jokes because a scene wasn’t working… so I bring alts to the set and he says, “I don’t know, these just all feel like jokes to me.” And I was like, “Well, yeah. They’re jokes. That’s what I do. That’s what we do. But for him, comedy was a by-product of authenticity. I would compare it to the difference between a kid who knows he’s cute and a kid who doesn’t know he’s cute. A kid who knows he’s cute is not cute. A kid who just says something without realizing it’s cute is hilarious.

(Source)

    So, The Office can make a joke out of something like Kevin wearing a green suit on St. Patrick’s Day or Dwight wearing an anime shirt to play basketball. It can make a joke out of Michael telling someone else’s joke, because the joke isn’t the joke itself but how he says it.

Source: IMDb.com

    I feel like this makes the humor in The Office feel more like the humor you get from interactions with your classmates or coworkers. It’s different from shows like Friends, where the characters constantly crack one-liners, or Community, where the setting and tone of the story are goofy in themselves. The people around you in real life can be hilarious, but not because they’re making jokes. They’re funny just because they act so in-character.

An Intermediate Point

    Because these characters exist in a place they don’t want to be, they dream about what they would rather do instead. Jim dreads that his job might become his career. Pam wants to be an artist, Michael wants to be a filmmaker, and Stanley wants to live in a lighthouse far away from everyone.

    Likewise, school is a place where everyone wants to be something. When you’re a kid in school, people always ask you what you want to be when you grow up. Everything you do comes with the assumption that you’re doing it to progress to the next stage of school, and ultimately to where you want to end up. School isn’t a place you’re supposed to stay in forever. But just like The Office, you have to bear with it, and all its drudgery, until you get to that place you want to be.

Source: BAMFStyle.com

    A lot of shows, and especially sitcoms, have a structure like this. Dropping characters into a less-than-ideal situation makes it easier to mine humor and give characters arcs. You could certainly compare Dunder Mifflin to Greendale Community College in Community, or the town in Schitt’s Creek. In those shows, as in The Office, the characters come into conflict with a status quo that they want out of, a status quo inseparable from the physical setting. We care about them more because this setting keeps crushing their dreams. And when they do achieve them, when Oscar runs for office and Stanley retires to Florida by himself, it feels more earned.

    I guess you could say that most stories involve characters stuck in a bad situation until they get to a happy ending. But I think what makes The Office’s conflict resemble that of a school so much is that the conflict is so tied to a specific, mundane place and the modes of interaction within it, and that the happy ending involves getting out of that place and into a career. They’re not going on an adventure and coming home. They’re not experiencing temporary conflicts in a system they otherwise like being in. They’re biding their time in an unpleasant, dreary status quo until they can pursue their dreams.

    While the characters in Friends experience conflict, they ultimately enjoy being friends and living with each other in the city. In The Office, nobody feels fulfilled working at Dunder Mifflin. Like kids in school, they’re counting the days until they graduate.

Shared Burdens

Source: simkl.com

    While you’re in this intermediate place, you have to do a lot of work that you don’t want to do. It’s unpleasant in a mundane way – you’re filling out papers or clicking on a computer, not fighting monsters. But it’s not just unpleasant, it exists for no apparent purpose. In grade school, you rarely feel like your classes and assignments teach you anything. The employees of Dunder Mifflin don’t feel like they’re doing something good for the world by selling paper. The rules and activities that come with this place feel arbitrary, and detached from the real world outside.

    People have different relationships with this kind of work. We all know Dwights who take their work way too seriously, Jims who take it exactly as seriously as they have to, Kelleys who don’t do it, and Kevins who are bad at it. People generally understand, though, that as much as they dislike the work, they have to do it.

    In both places, people are at the mercy of authority figures who aren’t always fair and don’t always understand them. Everyone might get punished for something only one person did. The authority figures, who are ordinary, flawed people themselves, make decisions that mean a lot more to the people under them than they realize.

The Little Things

    To pass time in a boring place like this, you get invested in the little things. Like waiting for a balloon that’s been stuck on the ceiling for a long time to fall, or making up games with the people around you like the Office Olympics.

    One of the scenes that first convinced me to watch the Office was the one where they all watch the DVD logo bouncing across the screen. I thought, “We used to do that back in grade school!” It felt like the show understood something really personal about me, even though it’s something a lot of people did.

    These shared burdens and the enjoyable interactions that pop up in spite of them build a sense of camaraderie among those stuck in the office/school. These things build stronger and more meaningful relationships than entirely enjoyable circumstances can make.

Passage of Time

Source: theodysseyonline.com

    Many episodes of The Office take place over a single work day. The show introduces a conflict at the beginning of the day and resolves it by 5:00. It takes this structure from peoples’ real lives and turns it into a story structure.

    On the season level, The Office is even more like a school than it is a real-life office. The traditional American television season runs from fall to spring, just like a school year. We bid farewell to the characters in May, and at the start of the next year we catch up with what they’ve done over the summer. Halloween and Christmas come and go.

Source: Reddit.com

    So, just as stories in our lives play out over the course of a school day and longer arcs happen over the school year, so do the Office’s stories happen on the day and season level.

The Setting

    Plenty of episodes do take place outside of this daily routine, though. Usually this corresponds to a change in physical location, like the booze cruise or the Florida trip. Other times, a special event changes the vibe of the usual office setting, like a birthday or holiday party.

    These episodes feel a lot like the times when you’re outside of a normal school day with the people you go to school with. The Gettysburg episode is like a class field trip, Beach Games is like a field day, and Casino Night is like a school dance.

    Episodes like this provide new modes of interaction for the characters that differ from what can happen in the usual setting. On the booze cruise, Jim and Pam sit with each other and their dates, and they have to reconcile both of those sides of their lives. They don’t act like they do when it’s just the two of them in the office slacking off. When Michael and Dwight visit Ryan in New York, we see a side to him that we don’t see when he’s the sharp executive checking in on the Scranton branch. Instead, we see him anxious, struggling with drugs, and a lot worse than what he looks like to his former coworkers.

    The same thing applies to these kinds of events at school. You can hang out with people you don’t share a class or lunch with. You can socialize more than you can in the short intervals between classes. You have new responsibilities. You might have to do holiday-themed activities at a class party, or stick with your bus buddy on a field trip.

    These events also provide new stimuli for characters to react to. On field trips especially, you and your classmates mix with the outside world. I remember going mini-golfing around Halloween with my sixth grade class, and my classmates talking to the costumed workers and making jokes with them. On our eighth-grade trip, a bunch of guys bought, like, little musical instruments from a gift shop and started playing them. Moments like these don’t feel too far off from Dwight confronting a Gettysburg worker about his conspiracy theory, or Kevin showing off his gambling knowledge on the golf course.

Source: BAMFStyle.com

    A trip to a character’s house provides an especially great opportunity to characterize them. We’ve all gone to someone’s house for the first time and seen how that person’s normal differs from our own. This can even happen with really small things, like them having different snacks or keeping their silverware somewhere else. We notice this more as kids, too, when we have less experience with things outside of our bubble and assume the way our home does something is the normal way.

    The Office takes advantage of this when it portrays its characters’ homes. We get so many new layers to Dwight by seeing Schrute Farms and its oddities, like his Cousin Mose or the weirdly-themed rooms. And of course, one of the show’s most popular episodes is Dinner Party, which shows off so much of Michael’s and Jan’s personalities by showing how they live together.

    This kind of characterization works great on a more subtle level, too. When the cast goes to Gabe’s apartment for a Glee viewing party, we see all his Japanese memorabilia. The show never focused on characterizing Gabe as a weeaboo before, but when we see it, it makes sense. That’s a mark of a well-written character that The Office displays on many occasions: showing us something unexpected about them that also makes complete sense.

Cinematography

Source: Youtube.com

    As part of The Office’s mockumentary format, it utilizes a lot of voyeuristic shots: shots taken through window blinds, with plants covering part of the view, and generally in angles that account for how a physical camera would occupy space. This also creates a sense of intimacy, like we’re sitting next to these people. We’re in the space, not in an audience beyond the fourth wall. We don’t get things like non diegetic music that the characters don’t have.

    What I also love about the early seasons of the show is the dim lighting. It looks more like how an actual office, with only fluorescent lighting overhead, would look. Way too many sitcoms use too-bright lighting, I guess in an attempt to create a more lighthearted atmosphere. I wish more shows would use the lighting already in the environment and not go overboard with the additional lighting.

Source: simkl.com

    The characters look more real in the early seasons, too. They have “ugly” hair and costumes, making them look more like actual Pennsylvanian office workers and not Hollywood actors. This realism extends to the props as well, from the toys on Michael’s desk to branded items like the many Wegman’s products in the break room.

Real-World References

    When discussing brands and products, TV shows have two options: make up a fictional brand, or use a real one. Fake brands can be a lot of fun. Parks and Recreation wrings a lot of good bits out of the companies like Sweetums or Gryzzl that take up residence in the also-fictional town of Pawnee. But using fake brands like these also drives a wedge between the viewers and the show. It’s one more thing separating what’s happening on screen from what our lives are really like. And because these fake brands often come with fake details designed to be more funny than realistic – like Paunch Burger’s child-size cups being literally the size of a child – it pushes the show further into the realm of the cartoon.

Source: buzzfeed.com

    The Office is full of real brands, from those of large corporations like Wendy’s to local Scranton businesses like Cooper’s Seafood. The characters’ desks feature trinkets from the radio station Froggy101, the University of Scranton, and the Tobyhanna bank. They discuss celebrities, pop culture, and world events like the 2008 recession.

    Of course, many works use fictional brands to avoid angering the real businesses and the people who run them. The Office got approval from some of the brands it used, which meant the brands had to approve the content of the episode. Businesses like Prince Family Paper that Michael shuts down are fake.

    Still, the inclusion of real brands like Turkey Hill or Staples helps make the office environment more immersive. The elements of the world aren’t designed to be bits. They’re made to look real. When the characters discuss these things like we do, they feel more like our peers and less like characters on a screen. And this is just another thing that contributes to the show feeling so much like our world, like they’re just people around us being their funny selves.

Conclusion

    The Office did not set out to create a fictional world. It created something that could be part of our real world, with funny, yet familiar, characters inside it. And in no part of our lives do we spend as much time with such strange characters as we do in school. The Office reminds us of spending time with our often absurd classmates and making the most of a boring situation.

    I hope this article gave you some insight into the kinds of elements that make for an effective school setting, even through this show that doesn’t take place in a school. Was there anything I missed? Or just an Office quote you want to repeat? Let me know in the comments. Pretend you’re an Office character and they’re your interview segment.

Source: Oxygen.com