Who's Afraid of Jan Levinson-Gould?

April 9, 2018 9:23 AM

An oral history of the most excruciating episode of The Office (US): The Dinner Party.
posted by Chrysostom (27 comments total)

You took me by the hand......
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 9:31 AM on April 9, 2018 [5 favorites]

THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID!!
posted by Fizz at 9:34 AM on April 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

That one night (one night)...

Great, now I have that stuck in my head.
posted by duffell at 9:41 AM on April 9, 2018 [4 favorites]

I was about to be all up in arms that this wasn't Scott's Tots, but the article qualifies this as 'brilliantly excruciating' -- which is accurate.

Well said. I've rewatched The Office multiple times, including the many episodes that are total duds. I have watched Scott's Tots exactly once.
posted by duffell at 9:48 AM on April 9, 2018 [5 favorites]

The Dinner Party may be the best total episode of the Office. But the moments I remember the most are the fire drill cold open, and Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy.
posted by nubs at 10:29 AM on April 9, 2018 [4 favorites]

And to be fair, I stopped watching before Scott's Tots. It felt to me like it was clearly declining in quality, so I stopped watching at the Jim & Pam wedding, which seemed to be the perfect capstone.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:37 AM on April 9, 2018 [8 favorites]

Since seeing that episode I have said "this will be great to cook with!" more than once upon receiving a bottle of wine from a dinner guest.
posted by bondcliff at 10:41 AM on April 9, 2018 [13 favorites]

I just looked at an episode list for Season 4 and they seem to have shot on location or at least outside the usual indoor office sets a lot. This was the season that started w the two episode Fun Run, includes the "panty raid" on the Utica office in episode 10 (directed by Joss Whedon, apparently), the survivorman survival challenge in episode 11, Jan's deposition in episode 12, and Night Out where Michael and Dwight go find Ryan in NY.

This episode is definitely an all time classic - now I, too, will have those two inane lyrics running through my head all afternoon.
posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 10:43 AM on April 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

nubs: "The Dinner Party may be the best total episode of the Office. But the moments I remember the most are the fire drill cold open, and Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy."

I'd say my top two are Michael's favorite NYC pizza place, and his berating Toby in Casino Night ("Why are you the way that you are? Honestly, every time I try to do something fun or exciting, you make it not that way. I hate so much about the things that you choose to be.")
posted by Chrysostom at 10:52 AM on April 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

You have no idea the physical toll that three vasectomies have on a person!
posted by Ber at 11:11 AM on April 9, 2018 [4 favorites]

"Why are you the way that you are? Honestly, every time I try to do something fun or exciting, you make it not that way. I hate so much about the things that you choose to be."

My favorite Toby moment will always be the exit interview when Michael tries to read his questions as if they're normal. "What... gives you the right?"
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 11:26 AM on April 9, 2018 [3 favorites]

The moment that sealed this episode for me was the camera on the tripod in their bedroom, which IIRC passes without mention.
posted by rhizome at 11:29 AM on April 9, 2018 [6 favorites]

The moment that sealed this episode for me was the camera on the tripod in their bedroom, which IIRC passes without mention.

IIRC, it does earn a Jim-look though.
posted by Fizz at 11:31 AM on April 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

Jan scolds Michael for not cleaning up in reference to the camera. I just watched the episode last week. Then we get the saddest part of the episode where Michael curls up on the little piece of furniture at the end of the bed because that's where he has to sleep.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 11:48 AM on April 9, 2018 [3 favorites]

I couldn't find the extended cut online, though it looks like the DVDs have some deleted scenes. There's a wiki for The Office with a description of some of those scenes.
posted by Pronoiac at 11:56 AM on April 9, 2018

I find this episode really interesting because, unlike pretty much the whole show after Season One, this one owes so much to the original British Office, where the humor is just about seeing how excruciating (very well chosen word there) they can make it.

The whole British show was stuff like this. David Brent maneuvers himself into some horrible situation and just hangs there, twitching feebly as he tries and fails to get out of it, and everyone else stands around looking uncomfortable. The US show tried that in the first season and they quickly realized it was a disaster with mainstream American audiences. So they revamped Michael completely. Then this episode is all about that. It's all about the other characters being trapped in that tiny condo, unable to look away as Jan and Michael let it all out.

This would have been just another day for the British show, but the US show had to earn an episode like that by giving us enough time and development to allow us to care about Michael, despite how idiotic and chaotic he is. He's never just awful in the show after season one. When he does something ridiculous, you understand where it comes from, and he even manages to do exactly the right thing once in a while. You learn to forgive him and love him despite it all, in a way that just wouldn't make sense with David Brent. And thus when Jan is so horrible to him, you feel for him.

Imagine David Brent dropped into that episode. He'd be just as awful as Jan, he'd deserve every bit of that episode, and it wouldn't be funny at all. It would be like watching a pair of white supremacists go at each other with long, heavy poles that were just a little too big to get a good grip on.

Someone else feel free to take the Metafilter: gag there...
posted by Naberius at 12:01 PM on April 9, 2018 [5 favorites]

Someone else feel free to take the Metafilter: gag there...

OK, here goes:

Metafilter: Someone else feel free to take the Metafilter: gag there...
posted by NoMich at 12:05 PM on April 9, 2018 [10 favorites]

The Office blooper reels are always fun to watch, but Krasinski trying to keep a straight face in the outtakes from this episode are just classic.
posted by Clustercuss at 12:21 PM on April 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

I watched this live. When Dwight showed up with his babysitter, my face looked just like Pam's.
posted by infinitewindow at 12:27 PM on April 9, 2018

Snip snap snip snap snip snap!
posted by yes I said yes I will Yes at 2:35 PM on April 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

OMG, if nothing else, treat yourself to the Soundcloud of the full(er) version of Hunter's song. It's clear why they used the bits they did (you don't want to bludgeon the audience), but what they didn't use takes it to next-level bad lyrics land.

And of course they were thinking of Woolf. I will say that when I watched it I thought immediately of Dave Sim [stay with me], who before going all preview-of-Gamergate, wrote a devoted homage to the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera scene in the ocean liner cabin in the form of Cerebus 51. The point is that somewhere in his writings in the back he explained that it was a classic "put all your characters in a closet" (paraphrase) concept. Now, at some level, that's the foundation for a sitcom anyway, especially a workplace sitcom (you can't go anywhere! because you'd be unemployed!), but obviously the only way they had to really turn up the volume to 11. Jim and Pam are obvious audience inserts here and play their normal observer roles, just more trapped than usual.

Side note: Nice to see this on the weekend when Krasinski's movie is a smash hit predicted to reach an eye-popping, silent-gasping $250M overall box office. Really hope he's getting participation, but as writer-director-star he's getting something. And also to point out that Ed Helms is getting good notices for his role in Chappaquiddick (he plays Kennedy cousin Joe Gargan).
posted by dhartung at 2:42 PM on April 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

the US show had to earn an episode like that by giving us enough time and development to allow us to care about Michael, despite how idiotic and chaotic he is. He's never just awful in the show after season one. When he does something ridiculous, you understand where it comes from, and he even manages to do exactly the right thing once in a while. You learn to forgive him and love him despite it all, in a way that just wouldn't make sense with David Brent.

I felt this way the first time I watched the show. Then years passed, I had a boss who was very much like Michael Scott in many ways, and I rewatched the show. And now I kind of wonder if the world really needs more chances to empathize with the Michael Scotts of the world, and reflect upon how they do the harm they do because deep-down they just want to be loved.

I mean, anybody who watches the show agrees that MS cares deeply about Pam as a person. He also forces her to do his job for him, sometimes at great inconvenience to her, never gives her any money, credit or recognition for it, and blames her when he screws up. The show lets him off the hook by making Pam endlessly empathetic toward him, ever-forgiving, and totally unconcerned with being treated by her boss as she smart, competent person she is, who should be given promotion and advancement (with or without a graphic arts degree).

But how caring and sweet a guy are you really, if you treat the people you care about like this? If you never learn from your mistakes? I guess I just have increasingly less heartspace for cis, hetero, ablebodied, thin, youngish, middle-class, straight, white* dudes who hurt and do harm to other people, even if it's only because they're insecure.

*I put allllll the adjectives in because over the years he offends across every one of those axes.
posted by mrmurbles at 3:01 PM on April 9, 2018 [5 favorites]

I tend to agree with mrmurbles because I have more sympathy for Pam than for Michael Scott. As much as she was willing to put up with his shit, it made perfect sense for her to run from that job in Philly that was practically hers because the boss (Bob Odenkirk, doing his best Steve Carell, which was pretty good) was just like Scott. There was something kind of manipulative about the show's excusing Scott acting like a wounded man-child because he was, well, a wounded man-child.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:05 PM on April 9, 2018

To be a little fair, I liked the Michael-Holly storyline a lot, which also coincides with Michael leaving, and I think there's growth and flying the coop in there. On the other hand, if I take a step back, Jim and Pam are exemplars of a bland white couple that Holly/Michael definitely are not.
posted by rhizome at 10:01 AM on April 10, 2018

Well of course you have more sympathy for Pam than for Michael! That's not the question.

The question is, do you have more sympathy for Michael than for David Brent?
posted by Naberius at 12:18 PM on April 10, 2018

Sure Michael is a wounded man-child and makes everyone else deal with the spillover of his wounded man-childness. But once in a blue moon they let him do something exactly right.

David Brent would never get within a hundred miles of a moment like this. Even if Michael has no idea what he just did right.
posted by Naberius at 12:27 PM on April 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

The question is, do you have more sympathy for Michael than for David Brent?

See, I think the question is how much more sympathy should you have for MS than DB?

I mean, theres a problem in that they’re not actual human people. DB is written to have an inhuman lack of vulnerability. MS is written — per the article — inconsistently. Different writers wrote him different ways, some writing him more sympathetically than others. But I think we are overinclined to be sympathetic to MS who, as far as I can tell, does demonstrably more harm than DB, if for no other incident than Scotts Tots. I don’t remember DB doing anything nearly that bad. MS literally ruins lives because those kids could have tried to line up other funding opportunities if he hadn’t lied to them.

But these characters are just illustrations of how we give some people too much benefit of the doubt, and others not enough. Imagine how we would feel about Kelly Kapoor if she humiliated an overweight employee of hers by insisting he get on a table that wouldn’t hold his weight, then after he quit decided to not try to offer him a job because “he’s too fat.” But MS does something like this in at least like half the episodes and he’s still “lovable” in the end.

And thats a reflection of society at large. People excuse racism with “economic insecurity.” They sentence rapist Brock Turner to 6 months in jail because they dont want to harm his promising future. They decline to convict white cops who kill unarmed black people because the white cops were “scared.”

The way we feel about MS is just an extension of all this — we’re often more sympathetic to his feelings of insecurity and shame than we are to the feelings or lives of the people he hurts.
posted by mrmurbles at 2:34 PM on April 10, 2018 [3 favorites]