A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

THE DUNDIES ARE LIKE A CAR WRECK THAT YOU WANT TO LOOK AWAY, BUT YOU HAVE TO STARE AT IT BECAUSE YOUR BOSS IS MAKING YOU: Yes, we link to Alan Sepinwall a lot, but if he's going to say that 'The Office' leaps to a level of further transcendence with Thursday's episode, we ought to listen:

TV shows rarely get a chance to make The Leap. The great shows tend to be great from the start. But occasionally there are shows that need a little time to figure out what works and what doesn't, and by the grace of patient schedulers, they get that time.

The first couple of years of "Seinfeld" were nothing to write home about, not until Jerry, George and Elaine spent an entire episode waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant. (And even then, the show didn't become consistently brilliant until the Keith Hernandez episode.) "The Simpsons" had heart and physical comedy from the start, but it wasn't until seasons three and four that it turned into the anything-goes satire we know and love.

To me, it's already been at that level since it at least "Booze Cruise", if not as far back as "Diversity Day" itself, with "Valentine's Day" as the highest of high points this season. I've previously written about how so much of the pathos derives from everyone's being stuck, and in that sense, the show's best comparison is "Cheers". Except there, you never had the sense that anyone had higher ambitions for his or her life than spending it in a bar with their compatriots; here, you acutely feel that almost everyone wants something better out of life but is unable to get there from here, whether it's Jim wanting Pam who wants better than Roy, Kelly wanting Ryan who wants to get out of his temp job, Angela wanting more with Dwight who wants to be the boss (but will never succeed Michael), and, of course, Michael, who wants to be the cool, admired boss he believes he already should have become. Only Stanley, really, seems content to treat it like a job and go home to his family at the end of the day, and doesn't much care about what his co-workers are up to.

The only other comparison I can make is to "The Larry Sanders Show", which had an equally narcissistic boss, delusional about his workplace popularity, only replace TLSS' pervasive insecurity with its inverse. Instead of the pressures of working in an ultra-competitive town-slash-industry where everyone's conscious of his place in the global pecking order and looking for the next opportunity, you've got a workplace in which nothing you will do can change your lot in life, as you're still living in a dying coal town.