The Office Recap: When Will it be Over?

“The Office” Recap: “Free Family Portrait Studio”

Yuck.

This season has been a storytelling disaster, and “Free Family Portrait Studio” is just another ugly reminder of how truly bad it has been.  It’s been nadir after nadir, but this desperate scramble to tie all the loose ends ignored while the show took us to Florida for no particular reason is the new rock bottom, narrowly beating out “Angry Andy” from a couple weeks ago.

Just when some narrative thrust had been achieved last week, with the surprising tension of Robert California and Andy Bernard mano-a-mano (even if the primary plot development was a shameless rip-off of seasons past, sort of like all of Andy’s stories this season), this week comes and…nothing.

This cop-out is so massive and shameless that it borders on dishonesty.

But if they copped out on their supposed major storyline, that means they went back to all the other stories they’ve half-assed this year, right?

Nope.

I can see inside their heads:

Writer Number One: “Oh, hey, remember Darryl and Val?  Whoa!  We forgot all about them.  Well, let’s just throw something totally artificial, unnatural, and insulting to the viewers’ intelligence out there.  They’ll swallow it!  We’re ‘The Office’!”

Writer Number Two: “Oh, hey, this Robert California climax is just too difficult to write.  Let’s just have him turn out to be a simpering little weakling in the end—just after he declared himself the ‘f*cking Lizard King’ last week—and let’s contrive some atrocious, ridiculous, and unbelievable fate for him, just to get rid of him because we couldn’t sign Spader for more than a season, which is really okay, because we never new what to do with him anyway.”

Writer Number Three: “Yeah, there was some thing about Angela’s baby and Dwight maybe being the father, and her husband being gay…right, we’ve been talking about that for over a year now, and haven’t done anything at all about it.  Well…let’s just leave it till next year!”

Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.  This is simply not the work of people who are serious about what they are doing.  Obviously the creative team left this show behind at the same time Steve Carrell did.  They are all looking towards their next projects, and throwing “The Office” together in their spare time.  They gained a critic this year, and lost a fan.  “The Office” may have been renewed, but it is over.