So this week’s episode of NBC’s once-upon-a-lineup cornerstone comedy did what the show has never done before: make Erin the receptionist the star of the episode. Depending upon your taste for Ellie Kemper’s unique brand of “weird cute” (or is it “cute weird”?), the episode was either thoroughly enjoyable or a massive letdown.
Admission: I think Kemper is a great talent and is too often underutilized by the show’s writers. Her primary function at Dunder Mifflin thus far has been to 1) serve as Andy Bernard’s love interest/foil, and 2) to offer what is often times the most bizarre depiction of femininity in all of its modern day cubicle glory. Pam is the female lead of the show, Angela its runner-up (or at least she used to be), Phyllis its quiet center of unspoken naughtiness and Kelly is, well, the eternal teenager whose entire value system can be found in the pages of Teen People (or the daily posts of MoeJackson). Meredith (like Creed) is an entity whose behavior defies categorization, so I shall leave her out of this.
Most sitcoms revel in holiday episodes: the Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and Valentine’s Day episodes of every major sitcom are big time events, usually reserved for sweeps and hyped to audiences with the potential for never-before-written-comedy-and-laughter.
“Spooked” didn’t quite get to that level of jocularity, but it did use Erin quite well, if nothing else. When she is charged by Andy with organizing Dunder Mifflin’s annual Halloween bash, she quickly tries to revamp her creation by making it more adult for the liking of Robert California’s brutish twat of a son. Of course, things don’t go as she had hoped and it ends in disaster. The bit about the “cinema of the unsettling” (courtesy her ex, Gabe) was a brilliant stroke in my opinion, though it was hard to watch . . .
Personally, I found this episode of The Office to be a brave new attempt to do something it hadn’t done before: to tell the story of Dunder Mifflin from the eyes of Erin, who is clearly on the track to having some kind of showdown with Andy. Plus, the costumes were awesome, notably Creed as Bin Laden and Dwight as Kerrigan from Starcraft.
The Andy-Erin storyline has kind of petered out lately, most likely since the show’s writers know that any attempt to one-up the fabled Pam-and-Jim love story is a fool’s errand. They won’t be able to do that because, unlike Pam and Jim, Erin and Andy are not real people: they are caricatures of office behavior we’ve all encountered.
But, hey, even weirdos need to fall in love, right?
Photo Credit: Campari
