This has been a difficult year for The Office. There are only three episodes left after “Paper Airplanes,” which aired Thursday night, and where 30 Rock rallied as it headed to the finish, The Office has seemed lost, particularly by devoting substantial time to world-building Dwight’s beet farm, a remnant of a failed spin-off effort. It never really found its feet after Steve Carell left, in part because Ed Helms’ Andy Bernard was forced into what felt like a bunch of recycled Michael Scott stories, then transformed briefly this spring into a true jerk, and now back to being a pitiable knockoff of bosses past.
But while they’ve been struggling in almost every other part of the show, the writers have created an affecting story of the struggling marriage of sweethearts Jim and Pam, who were pining friends at the beginning, then a couple, then newlyweds, then young parents,
and now people who are faced with the very serious problem of wanting different things. Pam is happy, as she’s explained, with the two of them living in Scranton with their kids. It’s enough for her. Jim, on the other hand, wants out of Dunder Mifflin and out of Scranton, and he’s been splitting his time between their house and a business in Philadelphia — an arrangement she agreed to, but understandably resents.
Lots of shows have momentarily imperiled their central relationships with misunderstandings and implausibly relevant third parties, but Jim and Pam have seemed genuinely threatened by some of the things that actually cause people who love each other to break up.
(And much less effectively by her friendship with a cameraman on the documentary that frames the show, a story that has mercifully receded.) Realistically, it seems impossible that they won’t eventually be fine, but there’s always been a wide stripe of melancholy running through the best parts of The Office, and this story has brought it back after Michael’s happy ending seemed to snuff it out for good.
