Adam Dorsey.com

Why TV Shows Get Bad

I’ve been watching the final season of The Office, and it’s been very painful and stressful and unfunny for me, and I’m not sure why. As each episode drags us closer to the finale, it seems they have been systematically destroying every relationship that I’ve spent the last eight years watching grow.

I was long a US Office denier. I loved the British show, and when it found its way across the pond, I watched a few episodes and then stopped. “I’ve seen this before, and it was better before.” About when season three hit, I started hearing rumblings that I needed to give it another chance. I never disliked it, but it was like I’d had a torrid love affair with a petite, surprising, firecracker on a trip to the British Isles, and although this may have been a prettier, younger version of that firecracker, I didn’t want to betray that love for someone just going through the motions. It took the show to get to season five and for NBC to put it on Netflix for me to finally catch up.

And I was hooked. I watched five years of Dunder Mifflin awkwardness, laughs, and heartbreak over the course of a couple weeks. I still loved my British Office, but I appreciated that this was a different beast. Once I was caught up, I started watching the weekly episodes with the rest of America, and found myself surprised when everyone was tired of it but me.

Everyone suddenly kept saying that it had seen better days. And I was confused, because I had just watched them all—I had just watched all of the days—and it hadn’t. Once the show had hit its stride, once it had established its own voice separate from its parent show, it had stayed good. But everyone who had watched along with it every week, they were sick of it.

I hear the same complaints about similar long running sitcom How I Met Your Mother, but you go back and watch a season one episode next to a season now episode, and the show isn’t tired, it isn’t unfunny. These shows didn’t change, people. You did.

And that’s the thing. People are always talking bad about what shows do when they’ve been on for “too long.” They change actors. They bring in younger, prettier people. They add a kid.

You know what else does that? REAL LIFE. Characters in your real life shift and change. Ones that used to be important move to the background, while new ones take the focus. One season there’s suddenly a baby.

The longer a show stays on the air, the more it becomes like real life, and people hate it, because people hate real life. Or, despite the abundance of “reality” tv, people don’t go to tv for reality.

One thing I’ve learned from life is that it’s long. A bad mentor once tried to tell me that you only get so many chances, but that’s not true at all. You pretty much get all the chances. If I could tell twenty-year-old Adam Dorsey one thing, it would be to relax. No doors ever close, they just get slightly less ajar, and with the internet and the amazingly long span of a lifetime, everything’s gonna circle itself back around, and you’re probably gonna get to sleep with everyone you’ve ever wanted to.

And that’s what a TV show does, it mirrors life. It starts off awkward and clunky, but with promise. It discovers itself and the characters you knew were in there manage to shine their brilliance through the screen. It changes and grows, retools and rearranges, but at its heart stays the same thing you found interesting in the first place. Then it overstays its welcome as it clutches on to the last breath of existence.

And as The Office takes one last breath, I don’t know why I’m so upset. I hate Jim and Pam, and I think they’d make a horrible couple if I didn’t think they deserved each other, but I still hate to see them having actual relationship trouble. I think Erin is too good for Andy, but it tears me up that she’s been having a secret office affair with that intern kid. Even Oscar and Angela’s squabbling over the Senator is too much for my heart to handle.

I don’t want to feel so strongly about this stuff. I don’t want to care about these people. I wish I knew why I felt this way. I wish I knew what the show did that made me need to keep watching it every week, even though it makes me feel this way. I’d rip it off and bottle it and sell a pilot to CBS.

An Open Letter to Jim Halpert

Hi, Jim. I don’t know if you know me, but I’ve been watching you for a while now. You seem like an okay dude, but you also seem like you could use a wake-up call. Consider this to be that.

I’ve been waiting. I’ve been waiting for you to realize that pulling pranks on Dwight and your other co-workers was fun and cute six years ago, but now you’re a fucking adult with a wife and a kid and another kid on the way, and I mean is anyone really falling for the “this is how I stay youthful” crap?

I’ve been waiting for you to realize that pulling pranks doesn’t keep you youthful, it keeps you an asshole. And you like to pretend like you’re a nerdy/geeky guy, even though you spend an hour every morning in front of the mirror trying to make your hair look like you just rolled out of bed, but you know what, Jim? The people who pulled pranks in high school weren’t the nerdy/geeky guys, they were the jocks, either pulling pranks on the nerds because they were bullies or pulling pranks on their pre-frat friends because they couldn’t handle their obviously homoerotic feelings for each other. So either you’re a jock in disguise, or you were so damaged by the jocks in high school that now you’re a thirty-something geek who is fixated on pulling pranks everyday, because that’s the only way you think someone can be cool.

I mean, what if you just stopped, Jim? I mean what if you just started doing your job and raising your kids and loving your wife and put away these idiotic pranks? Are you afraid that you’d see how empty your life is? How unfulfilling your career and your marriage is? Are you afraid you’d see that you are a just a cog in a machine, and not even a cog in a worthwhile machine, but a cog in a paper distribution machine? You’re in a dying industry, Jim, and goddamn I hope it can hold its death rattle long enough for you to raise your kids and retire unfulfilled.

Maybe you’re afraid your wife won’t love you anymore if you start being honest with yourself. Did she only fall for you because of your pranks? Maybe she did, and if you stop then she’ll stop, and then you’ll be alone again. God, Jim, your marriage is such a sham. Two people don’t have to be that cute all the time. It’s so fucking forced. If you really loved each other, every once and a while you could just chill out and fucking be with each other. Enjoy each other’s company. If you can’t let your charm guard down in front of your wife, then what’s the fucking reason for the partnership? The point you stop insisting your relationship have all the tropes of a Seinfeld episode is the point where you can honestly start loving each other. Only what if you realize then that you never really did love each other? Ah, there’s the rub.

Because you had such a healthier relationship with that Parks and Rec girl. You did. It wasn’t some cutesy co-dependent bullshit, it was a fucking relationship, Jim. And that scared the shit out of you, and you retreated to the safety of your “youth” and your pranks and your flirty office romance that represents all of the regrets in your life. At least Dwight knows what he wants, at least Dwight is honest with himself and the world. You hide behind engineered hairdos and pranks and self-aware goofy stares at cameras.

Do you think that makes you better than everyone else? That you can look at a camera and with one expression you can judge everyone else? If you’re always looking at the cameras and you’re never looking at yourself, then you’re never gonna be more than what you are now, Jim.

At least Michael Scott got out. You always looked at him as a fool, you constantly judged him for stumbling through life, but you know what you call stumbling? The rest of us call living. By making those mistakes week-in and week-out, Michael Scott might have become the butt of your jokes, but he also became a better man. He found love, and he got real meaning from his job and his friends and his life, and then he knew when to move on to the next thing. Jim, you’re not going to know when to move on. You’re still acting like you’re twelve, and not in a pranky-fun way, but in a way that is just going to get sadder and sadder. You’re going to start taking it out on your wife, because she is the closest person in your life—which is doubly sad because you never even really let her in, did you? And then you’re going to start taking it out on your kids, insisting they play the sports you never did, they pull the pranks you never did, they live the life you never lived.

But in the end Jim, when you’re too old to play pranks, and everyone else has moved on, you’re gonna give one last sarcastic look at that camera, and maybe you’ll feel like you had the last laugh. But in reality? You died alone.

—Adam Dorsey

P.S.: I liked you better when your name was Tim and you were British.