In Praise of Michael Scott
Until I moved to Boston, I didn’t watch much TV. I watched sports, 24 and Lost. There were plenty of shows that were recommended to me, but I never really had the time to spend in front of a TV. I used most of my free time to write, hang out with friends, and play IM sports (though not necessarily in that order).
Anyways, fast forward a couple years, and I’m here in Boston with no friends and a job that has me spending copious amounts of time in my own living room, physically in front of my TV. I’ve also discovered Netflix Instant, which is basically the broadband internet of watching TV (if TV in the old days was pre-Internet, and TV on DVD was dial-up; at this point, it’s hard NOT to watch old TV shows). One of the first shows I checked out, after years of recommendations, was the US version of The Office.
I watched it chronologically, starting with season one, which was a challenge. Season one consists of only six episodes, and in this early going, Michael Scott – Dunder-Mifflin, Scranton’s Regional Manager, is at his most idiotic and hurtful. In later seasons of the show (basically starting in season two – the writers must have made a quick, tactical decision), Michael is far more human than in those first six episodes. Nevertheless, I stuck with the show, watched seasons 2-5 in (literally) one week, and now am a faithful, dedicated fan.
N0w the show is funny, to be certain. There are very successful dramatic elements, but if someone asked you “Why is The Office so good?”, I think you’d still have to answer “Because the jokes are good.” What I think is interesting is why the show is funny – or rather, why it’s so much funnier or better than other shows on TV. The four main characters are Jim and Dwight, sales clerks; Pam, the receptionist; and Michael, the boss. Comedically speaking, the former three are straightforward archetypes: Jim and Pam are “everymen” (though it must be noted that they have the dual role of carrying much of the dramatic weight of the series). Dwight is the nerdy, socially inept barbarian who is ironically ignorant of his own qualities. You could even call him an idiot savant, given that he wins sales awards while showing himself somehow incapable of even interacting in a regular way with the other salesmen. Perhaps “idiot savant” is new ground for a sitcom.
Michael Scott, however, strikes me as the one primary character who is particularly unique and of-the-times. To the extent that he is an “inept boss,” he is a character that we’ve seen before. To the extent that he is “the boss that everyone hates,” he is a character that we’ve seen before. What is unique about him is that his negative qualities all arise from an embellishment of qualities that are all admirable, or at least pitiable.
Michael Scott is a terrible boss because he just wants friends. Because he’s lonely.
I think you could argue that it’s easier right now to hate your boss than ever before. Of course, everyone has always hated their boss, and they always will. No one likes the person who tells them what to do. Think of the people you’ve always hated. At different times in your life, that list has probably consisted primarily of your parents, teachers, bosses, and the police. It’s a thankless job, ordering people around. But the fact remains that that hatred is really just a kind of knee-jerk, peer-pressure hatred. 50% of the time, it has nothing to do with who that boss actually is. It’s a personal reaction to what they represent.
Things are different now, though. In the last ten years or so, The Corporation has become public enemy number one in America. It’s the most unifying enemy we have right now, in the grand tradition of Taxation Without Representation, Nazis, Communism, et. al. It crosses class lines because for 99.999% of people, there’s always someone richer than you are, and it crosses party lines because everyone hates a greedy bastard.
The ascension of The Corporation has transformed hating your boss from something purely personal and almost mechanical into something with a tinge of nobility. It’s rock n’ roll, the 21st Century way to stick it to the man. You no longer hate your boss just because he tells you what to do; you hate him because he represents the higher-ups that always screw the little guys with their schemes to acquire more, superfluous money.
And that’s the beauty, timeliness, and cultural resonance of Michael Scott (and, of course, the juxtaposition that makes him hilarious): whereas the hated boss is now synonymous with the greedy suit who doesn’t care about the people below him, Michael Scott is inept BECAUSE he cares about the people below him, both in the sense that he considers them “family,” and in the sense that he truly, madly, deeply just wants them to like him.
All of Michael’s hijinks seem to come from this incredibly lonely place. He takes his employees on a booze cruise, and constantly interrupts the captain of the ship not because he’s power hungry but because he thinks people will like him more if seems like the biggest, coolest guy aboard. He makes crass jokes that are very often offensive, but he makes them because in his social calculus, being funny is the most attractive quality one can have.
The challenge of Michael Scott, then, is to make his underlying longings visible under the buffoonery. As Verne Gay points out in his recent comments on the current season’s premiere, “Michael is a clinically interesting personality type who is profoundly unempathetic, until such times as he is very empathetic. The wonderful creative trick of “The Office” is knowing exactly the right moment to humanize Michael.” That, I think, is the longer answer about why The Office is so good.
The longest answer, though, is that the writers always make Michael’s internal logic clear, and this logic goes against the grain of what we want to think about him as one of pop culture’s classic bad bosses. The Office is great for exactly the reasons Gay points out, but it’s perfectly right for right now because Michael is a character that forces us to re-examine reality and question our instincts regarding a current favorite, widely-accepted, tacit platitude.
And really, that’s what good, lasting comedy does (I think). Jim and Pam are generally regarded to be the characters do all the hard work for The Office’s drama. I’d bet that Dwight is generally considered to be the most lasting comic character on the show. But I think Michael does all the “relevancy” heavy lifting. And for that, Michael Scott, I think you are in a very unique, beautiful position.
That’s what she said.
