I’m still rewatching The Office, watching an episode after listening to the podcast episode from The Office Ladies, and I’m noticing character details that even they don’t seem to have registered. The one that’s hitting me in this go-round is that Jim is what Michael is trying to be, while Michael is what Jim is in danger of turning into.

Michael wants to be the life of the party, the one who keeps morale in the office up with his hilarious jokes and pranks. He sees himself as well-liked and successful, the hot bachelor who can snag any woman. But he doesn’t seem to have any dreams of moving beyond where he is. He’s found his niche of success as regional manager of a paper company, and he only does anything toward moving beyond that when his position is threatened. He likes being the big fish in a small pond, and his dreams are pure dreams — stand-up comedy, screenwriting, improv, acting, being a secret agent. They aren’t anything he actually does much about. He writes a screenplay, which stays in a drawer (where it belongs, to be honest). He doesn’t seem to have made any effort to improve, so it was merely about playing out his personal fantasy of being a secret agent, not a serious effort to become a screenwriter. He takes the improv class, but considers himself to already be a genius, so he resists any effort at guidance by the instructor and alienates the rest of the class by being a poor collaborator.

Jim actually is the life of the party who keeps morale up in the office with his jokes and pranks, but a big difference is that his morale boosting comes from him paying attention to what the other people want and what will boost them. When Michael’s out of the office and Jim comes up with fun things to do, like the Office Olympics or the screenplay table read, he doesn’t build it around himself. He focuses on encouraging the others and drawing them out, like giving timid Phyllis the role of the sexy girlfriend in the table read or finding a “sport” for everyone in the Olympics. He even often overcomes his own dislike for Michael by soothing his ego, like giving him an Olympic medal in a stirring closing ceremony or joining him for a karaoke duet when Michael crashes his party at his home. Jim is the guy popular with women, managing to win the women Michael wants but turns off with his weird behavior. Michael talks about how cute Pam is (or used to be), but Pam falls in love with Jim. Jim’s the one who takes the hot girl (a pre-famous Amy Adams) home after Michael spends the day trying to impress her.

But Michael is also a cautionary tale for Jim, what could happen to him if he stays where he is. Is the best he can hope for being regional manager of a paper company someday? Will his jokes and office antics go from being a morale boost to making his staff cringe and keeping the HR department busy? Will he continue to have dreams that he never acts on? That’s why the later seasons are difficult to watch for me because he seems to realize all this, himself, but when he tries to act on his pent-up dreams instead of just playing them out in a computer game, he gets cast as the bad guy and it nearly destroys his marriage because it draws attention away from his family and leaves his wife carrying the load. That’s unfortunate because he had supported her so strongly in pursuing her dreams, but at that time they were just dating and didn’t have two small kids to deal with, so the situations aren’t equal. I’m not at that point in the rewatch yet. I’m still in season two, when Jim is pining for an engaged (but clearly unhappy) Pam and avoiding going after other, better jobs because that means being away from Pam.

Last night’s episode was “The Injury,” which may be the ultimate episode of this series. It doesn’t get into any of the ongoing arcs, but it so perfectly represents what the show is about, with Michael being so childish and demanding about his minor injury that he completely misses Dwight’s more serious injury (and then still tries to take the spotlight even after they realize Dwight has a concussion), and Jim having to step up and be the adult in the room to take care of Dwight and deal with Michael (the scene with the spray bottle in the van is one of the funniest things ever on television).

One thing I love about this series is that the documentary format did away with the studio audience/laugh track thing for TV comedy and let the TV audience decide for ourselves when to laugh. I’ve now reached the point where I can’t watch old-school sitcoms with a laugh track.

I found something I wrote back in late 2020, probably for a TV forum, on how various characters on The Office would deal with the pandemic, if you teleported the season 2-3 cast/situation to 2020 (rather than where they’d have actually been in 2020). I may have to post that next week, especially if I still have Book Brain and can’t come up with anything else.