Suck It Up, Jim and Pam!

Retaliatory Puking
I love that the romantic, smoochy, wedding one-hour special of The Office began with a total gross-out cold open.  Not only does Pam offer a retaliatory puke when Dwight insists on peeling and eating a hard boiled egg in front of her poor pregnant nose, but she sets off a chain reaction of an entire, over-the-top office barfing extravaganza.  It was like those awful hose-up-the-sleeve SNL skits, and it was kind of amazing!  Best of all, though, was the shot of Creed who, while we for one second thought was throwing up, was actually eating noodles while watching the disgusting festivities.  Creed, without a doubt, is one of my favourite, brilliantly underestimated characters on the show!

An E-bay possibility?
Lots of amazing moments in this episode – Dwight’s seductive track one for Michael’s mood music CD; Michael interrupting Jim’s terrible toast to insist, in an effort to explain how Pam got knocked up, that “It’s a different sensation”; Erin asking Andy if the wood might be too hard on his damaged penis; and last but not least, Michael’s awesome portrait of Jim and Pam – please NBC, auction that thing off on e-bay, because I will bid more than I can afford for it!

Suck it up, Jim and Pam!
So of course we’re supposed to think it’s super romantic that Jim and Pam run off to have a secret wedding – but really, I’m just sort of tired of their whining.  Wah, Pam, your veil ripped.  Boo hoo, guys, your guests are annoying.  Guess what, it’s a wedding – that’s how they go.  Get over it! This really is one of those key differences between the American Office and the British one.  With Ricky Gervais, a move like that would have been simultaneously sweet and revelatory of how pathetic those characters really are.  With the American Office – which, granted, I also love – its desire to hang on to some schmaltzy sweetness only makes us, the weepy audience, into the pathetic ones.    

Primetime Youtube
That being said – damn I was feeling it for those original youtube folks whose wedding video became the center of the show. How does that work?! Some folks do a funny thing at their wedding, film it and think, ‘hey, let’s just throw this up on youtube’.  It goes viral and now one of the most popular shows on tv uses it in its season anchor episode.  This is a new stage in the whole: sitcoms are popular + reality tv is more popular = mockumentaries become a ridiculously popular way to tell a story…now we’re layering in the most reality of reality tv: youtube home videos.  Friends, if you didn’t see the original version of this, “Jill and Kevin’s Big Day,” check it out here.  I think you’ll find, this is a case (as with The Office in general) where, while NBC’s is great, the original is better!

For more on The Office, see here.
Posted by Natalie.