My last memories of Johnny came in the early 1990′s when he appeared to be out of touch with the times. Still in top form as a host, I saw him interview guests and appear to have little clue who they were or why they were on his show. I can recall Morrissey on the show as a musical guest and Carson, along with his guest, Bill Cosby, share an incredulous look as to why the teenage L.A. audience that night shrieked every time he mentioned Morrissey’s name. Carson retired in 1992, still a dominant force on television, still the place to be if you wanted to make a name for yourself. He went out on top and then he disappeared from the limelight.

For anyone who never saw Carson in his prime, especially people who were born into a television landscape with four or five late night talk show hosts, they may wonder what the big deal is about this one man. So what? He interviewed people and put on some skits- Leterman, Leno and Conan all do that. Hell, even Arsenio Hall was doing it before his show went off the air. What they don’t understand is that for 30 years, Carson was the only one. He was the destination place for actors, musicians and people with interesting lives to appear before the nation. For stand-up comedians especially, appearing on Carson and making the man laugh (or even better, having him call you to the couch for an interview) could make a career… the next day. What Jay,Dave, the Jimmy’s and Conan are all doing was perfected by Carson and they’re all indebted to him. That is just one of the points made in this compelling documentary from director Peter Jones, premiering on PBS tonight at 9 PM (check local listings) as a part of the network’s long running series, American Masters.

Carson was a notiriously private man, granting very few interviews in his lifetime (he died in 2005). Jones was granted unprecedented access to the late TV star’s personal and professional archives, including family photo albums, home movies, memorabilia and all existing episodes of Carson’s Tonight Show from 1962 until his retirement. He and his staff culled through over 4,000 episodes to compile a portrait of an enigma. While showing his brilliant talent as an entertainer, Jones also shows the complex personal life of Carson, warts and all. When he wasn’t on camera, Carson was a known womanizer, was married four times, had a distant relationship with his three sons (from his first wide), struggled with alcohol, and could seem aloof and cold. In what seems like an age old tale of Hollywood, Carson longed for the approval of his mother, whom he adored, yet she never paid him a compliment, even at the height of his success. Carson chose to let his work speak for itself and Jones found the clues to Carson’s life in the hours of footage when Carson was quite revealing about himself on camera.

Besides the great footage from every year of The Tonight Show, as well as clips from Carson’s early forays into television on CBS and ABC, Johnny Carson: King of Late Night  also features 45 interviews with performers who appeared on, or began their careers, on The Tonight Show. Included are Severinsen, David Letterman, Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, Ellen DeGeneres, Carl Reiner, Don Rickles, Bob Newhart and Steve Martin. Joan Rivers appears and discusses her famous falling with Carson after she went to start her own late night talk show. Drew Carey and Garry Shandling both get choked up when discussing Carson and the profound effect he had on their lives.

For anyone who grew up with Johnny, this documentary is like a visit with an old friend. The only thing that would make it better is if PBS were to air it at 11:30 PM.  For students of television unfamiliar with Carson’s place in the history of the medium and his rightful place as one of the most important pop culture figures in the 20th Century, Johnny Carson: King of Late Night is the ideal place to start learning about him and how he helped shape the way we watch television.

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Politics hasn’t really been covered in movies or TV like this before. Perhaps that’s because Veep was created and co-written by Armando Iannucci of the satirical British series The Thick Of It and the film In the Loop.

Obviously the inspiration and entry point for this is the alternate universe in which Sarah Palin became vice president, except that that’s not really what Veep is about because Vice President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis Dreyfus, in another riveting comic performance) is a environmentalist and a Democrat, and her intelligence or preparedness are not in questioned. But it would be too late, one-note, and dull to do a Palin send-up this late in the game. Nor is gender politics really an issue the way it’s been made out to be one with Palin. Veep has a far more fascinating take in that it’s simply about what it’s like to be the Vice President of the United States which is to say, to have power but not really to not have power and to be tantalizingly closer to power, and to fill your days with soul-killing glad handling, public relations, niceties, and pleasing everyone without accidentally making a huge gaffe (which, of course, Meyer does anyway). Veep is a thoroughly, and darkly absurd, dismantling of the romance and history of politics.

Meyer and her team of consistently exasperated aides (including Anna Chlumsky, Matt Walsh, and Tony Hale) play the Washington game of press junkets, handshake ceremonies, and favor trading, but long for something more to do. This plays out in what is likely to be a wonderful running joke: “Did the president call?” Meyer asks her secretary. “No,” the secretary invariably responds. And he probably never will.

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HBO’s adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series is a war between two kinds of time. On one side is the time-sink of Martin’s vast, sprawling and ongoing series of novels that span thousands of pages filled with hundreds of characters and dozens of simultaneous plot threads. On the other side is the speed of televised storytelling with its ability to show tens of pages worth of content in the space of a few seconds and distill multiple conversations into a single scene relying on skilled actors to deliver volumes of meaning in one nuanced line reading. HBO has already proved its ability to create a visually stunning and suitably tense adaptation. The challenge ahead of it going into Season 2 of Game of Thrones is whether or not it’ll be able to distill an ever-growing story into one hour a week without turning the show into a 10-season monster.

GoT Season 2 opens (thankfully) in a different place than A Clash of Kings, the second book in the series. George Martin has a habit of beginning and ending his books in unfamiliar places filled either with characters we’ve never seen before or with shock twists that won’t be explained for years of real time. It takes this opening episode quite a while to introduce Melisandre, the priestess of the mysterious god R’hllor, or for that matter Stannis Baratheon, both of whom will end up being major players as the story progresses but have so far played no part in the series. “The North Remembers” opens instead in the familiar seaside city of King’s Landing where most of Season One took place. Evil brat Joffrey is enjoying a bit of mortal combat beside Sansa Stark, the girl whose father he had beheaded some time earlier. The scene sets the tone for a number of key characters, including old faces like Tyrion, but also introduces Ser Dontos, a guy who’ll be a sorta big deal a long time from now and…

…see, this is what I’m talking about. I’m among the half of the GoT audience who have read George Martin’s novels, so this all makes a lot more sense to me than it would to someone who has only ever watched the show. It’s great that the adaptation is so faithful to the source material, but Seven help us, it’s all so damn confusing. The twisty politics of Westeros are labyrinthine on purpose but the many other stories blossoming in the show are about to gather their own sprawling casts of important names and webbed relations. Jon Snow is going to mix us up in the lore of the North beyond the Wall, Daenerys will soon have several cities full of people and politics to handle in the East and we haven’t even been to freakin’ Dorne yet.

For all my misgivings about the vast undertaking of adapting A Song of Ice and Fire, the presentation of Game of Thrones remains excellent. Viewers unfamiliar with the books may never be able to sift through the ever-growing mythology and, short of reading the books themselves, I wouldn’t even encourage them to try. Rather, it’s better to just enjoy the ride. The sets are nicely appointed, the costumes are spot-on, the acting is great and the dialogue is sharp. It doesn’t require a steel trap memory of Lannister family history to appreciate the subtext-laden conversations between Cersei and Tyrion, nor is an understanding of Valayrian magic necessary for Daenerys’s dragons to be cool, nor is the montage of child murders that caps the premiere any less terrifying if one doesn’t remember old King Robert Baratheon’s tendency to make illegitimate offspring all over the city because of the deep heartache he felt for the death of his one true love.

I’m sure Random House wants Game of Thrones to be compelling enough to get viewers hooked but confusing enough to make them seek out the books (which they have in huge numbers). I’m also sure HBO wants to keep the show thrilling for all of its audience, whether they’ve read the books or not. If GoT sticks to the more visceral pleasures on parade in “The North Remembers” without getting too bogged down in names and mythology, everyone should remain happy and the show should remain a hit.

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Look upon Pete Campbell's period suit and tremble!

“I don’t really care about work. I care about you.”

That, you incredibly patient fans of Mad Men, is not the only lie Don Draper tells over the course of the first two episodes of Season 5, but it is the biggest one. You see, the patron saint of bad ideas has decided to make his hastily married second bride a low-level designer in the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce creative department, either because he has an incredible blind spot to the poisonous environment of his workplace or because he’s actively trying to sabotage his latest stab at happiness. Hell, it’s probably both, but that’s why we watch this show. That and the essential snippets of humor that keep the devastating proceedings of each episode from being the world’s biggest downer.

Yes, it has been a year and a half since Mad Men last aired a new episode and now that it’s finally back it spends 93 minutes reminding us that all of its characters are unhappy people with incredibly interesting lives that exist at the mercy of social change they ironically can’t predict. Most of “A Little Kiss” parts one and two focus on the internal struggles of the people we’ve been following faithfully on Mad Men for years now, but something bigger looms around the margins. Throughout the double-stuffed premiere, SCDP plays a joke on a competing ad agency that got into hot water for mistreating a protest by black civil rights activists. Roger takes out an ad in the newspaper that refers to his company as an “equal-opportunity employer” and everybody has a nice laugh over it in their lily-white office on Madison Avenue. By episode’s end, reception is full of black applicants who, understandably, aren’t in on the private joke. The lesson? There are consequences to every action, even when everyone on the playing field is kind of a cad, and the ever-changing world won’t stand for it.

Really, that’s the overarching message of “A Little Kiss”. It’s clear that Matthew Weiner et al were cognizant of the fact that their show has been off the air for what amounts in TV time to an epoch, so a lot of the premiere is dedicated to reintroducing audiences to the characters and circumstances of the series. A little time has passed since the end of Season 4 but the same problems persist. Roger is still a conniving alcoholic who is losing his sales prowess, Pete is still a dangerously ambitious man-child, Peggy is still the most under-appreciated genius to ever become a professional cynic and Don…

…oh, Donald “Dick Whitman” Draper, when are you not a mess? When last we left our anti-hero he had crawled from the depths of addiction to reclaim his perch on the precipice of addiction just long enough to marry a lovely young woman he really didn’t know at all because, yes, she demonstrated the patience of an adult when his children spilled a milkshake in public. Today, he’s doing his best impression of happy while sewing the seeds of his and other people’s discontent. Megan, Don’s bilingual and endlessly sexual trophy wife, throws him a surprise party for his 40th birthday, then proceeds to fill the evening with a nightmare scenario of embarrassing coworkers and inappropriate singing.

Of all the plots introduced or reintroduced in “A Little Kiss”, Don’s shaky but not-all-terrible marriage is the most divisive and yet most compelling. As much as I (and I’m sure plenty of other viewers) root for Joan to find the appreciation she deeply deserves but can never find, and as much as we get a kick out of Lane’s awkwardness and Harry Crane’s infinite supply of douchebaggery, Don is still the main character. The episode does a good job of justifying Don’s new life with Megan and not just making it Roger & Jane Part 2. Megan is trying and she’s no naif, but she’s not prepared for the rotten foundation of the entire advertising industry into which she married. Her emotional wreck of a husband, despite his sales pitch at the end of the episode, cares deeply about work. He just has a hateful, co-dependent relationship with his coworkers and, as the party demonstrates, he has literally no other friends. From a critical perspective as much as a fan perspective, I want to see Season 5 of Mad Men do something new and interesting with Don and Megan. Ripping them apart early would just be wheel-spinning and their pathos-laden relationship makes for good drama.

Also, Don’s new apartment is insanely gorgeous and I’m not keen to see it turn into a ruinous bachelor den any time soon.

So, despite the long hiatus and the budding careers of the show’s ridiculous number of breakout stars, Mad Men has still got it. Rejoice, you cable-watchers and downloaders, the preeminent cable drama is back.

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The premise of Bent has the potential to carry on for several seasons: Alex, an uptight lawyer (Amanda Peet), is a single mom living in Venice, CA. She hires Pete, a contractor (David Walton), to rebuild her kitchen. He’s a recovering gambling addict seeking redemption after pissing away all of his money, betraying his crew and screwing things up with his (almost) fiance. Anyone who’s ever seen Murphy Brown knows that the client/contractor plot can carry on for awhile. In the meantime, Alex and Pete let the sexual tension build.

Alex’s daughter, Charlie (Joey King) instantly bonds with Pete, much to the chagrin of Alex’s doctor boyfriend, Ben (Matt Letscher). Alex’s promiscuous sister, Screwsie- yes, that’s her name- (Margo Harshman) has the hots for Pete, as do Alex’s nanny and just about every woman he speaks to. Pete lives with his out-of-work actor father, played by the great Jeffrey Tambor, and does his best to appease his crew, a group of guys that include Clem (JB Smoove), Vlad (Pasha Lychnikoff) and new guy, Gary (Jesse Plemons).

I loved everything about Bent, from the smart dialogue to the perfect casting of each character. It impressed me that the writers weren’t afraid to deal with Pete’s flaws, especially his gambling problems. It’s nice to see that addiction isn’t being used a punchline here, but actually adds something to his character. I’ve been a fan of Walton’s since I first noticed him on Quarterlife a few years back. He walks in Pete’s shoes with ease. Amanda Peet has always been a talented comedic actress and this role really suits her. Anyone who’s seen recent seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm know how f’n funny JB Smoove is, so it’s great to see him on TV again.  And I’m loving the fact that Jesse Plemons is on a new series. I’ve missed Landry since he graduated from Friday Night Lights.

Since Bent is only going to be on another couple of weeks, I’m not sure how NBC plans to judge the show’s ratings, especially since it has the world’s shittiest lead-in (those aforementioned crapfest “comedies”) and it’s up against Idol and Modern Family. I wish the creative team behind Bent the best of luck. Seriously.  I have a track record of liking shows and watching them get cancelled, so I hope that my luck changes and the NBC brass realizes they have a great show on their hands. It has Jeffrey Tambor, damn it! Enough of my rant, check out the show.  It’s streaming on NBC’s website and two new episodes air next Wednesday.

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Two relatively interesting things happened on NBC this week. The Office finally closed out its Florida arc by dragging most of the subplot’s principal characters back to Scranton and Community returned after a long, nervous hiatus. Coincidentally and with two different conclusions, both shows explored the same issue: How do we reconcile the paths life provides to us?

I think the answer both shows reach is a reflection of the core sentiments the shows represent. Furthermore, I believe these sentiments explain why Community is struggling to justify a fourth season despite a small but fervent fanbase and The Office is trudging along through to a guaranteed 9th season. In essence, Community is a comedy of hope and joy while The Office has long retained its core of sadness and desperation.

Since this column has been about The Office, I’ll start there. “Get the Girl” relegates the last of the Florida arc to the B-plot as Andy arrives in Tallahassee to win back Erin, who has remained there after the Sabre store project in a bid to start a new life. After a fun smattering of scenes that play mostly as speedy scenarios geared for laughs instead of actual storytelling, the two star-crossed goofballs reunite and drive back to Scranton in love out of nowhere. Satisfying? Not in the least, but when has the Andy/Erin plot ever been about depth?

The main plot of the night involves Nellie’s sudden appearance in Scranton with the intention of taking the manager’s job. Lucky for her, Andy is MIA and Robert California is more interested in being amused by these strange “hu-mans” than running a proper business. Through manipulation and luck, Nellie wins over everyone in the office except for Jim.

(a small aside: I actually like that Jim has become principled all of a sudden. He stood up to Cathy, saved Dwight’s job and resists Nellie’s coup when nobody else does. It makes sense for a father of two and a man who has found meaning even in a seemingly meaningless existence. Let’s hope the show keeps him on this path).

Ultimately, Nellie wins the day and leaves us with a chilling outro. She explains her unlikely rise to the manager’s position by asserting that American business and even the American dream is entirely random. Throughout the episode, different characters propose different reasons for why things are the way they are in life. Some say it’s survival of the fittest, others admit that it’s all relative to one’s circumstances. Even Toby, who tries to pass himself off with the somewhat slicker name Tony, thinks it’s really all about appearances. But the episode leaves us with this idea that, in the end, it’s all random and pointless. That idea has been hanging over The Office since the beginning and we’ve taken humor from the absurdity of this nihilism or from the defiance of others against it. I’m still not thrilled with Season 8, but at least episodes like “Get the Girl” suggest the writers are really thinking about larger themes going into Season 9.

Community comes at things from a different angle. Every character in “Urban Matrimony and Sandwich Arts” spends some time despairing over the seeming inevitability of their inborn identities. By the end, though, they all find an unexpected path to a happier, more fulfilled place by learning from one another. This is the default mode for Community, even if it isn’t afraid of going to darker territory.

But comedy isn’t about feeling good, ironically. Comedy is about identifying absurdity and facing upsetting things with a laugh. Sometimes it’s a laugh of recognition, other times it’s a laugh of relief. Community may be more fun than The Office, but it exists in a different world than the one in which we live. In the world of Greendale Community College, things always work out and people find their better angels. At Dunder-Mifflin/Sabre, life is a sea of pointless gray punctuated with moments of unnoticed absurdity. The Office plugs into something unpleasant about life, like the seeming randomness of power structures, and forces us to gaze at it unblinking for 22 minutes a week. It may not always work as art or as entertainment, but damned if it isn’t affecting.

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I may step on some critics’ toes for this statement, but I believe film will always be at least a little more respectable than television. It’s not because film attracts an inherently higher caliber of actor or is inherently better at creating strong characters, only that film has a stronger obligation to the creation of a proper story. Barring the tendency to churn out sequel after sequel of a profitable blockbuster, films are made with the understanding that they have to come to a satisfying conclusion in order to tell a good story. Characters have to change, as do circumstances and overall tone. Something has to happen between beginning and end. Television, on the other hand, is less subservient to the inevitable end. The temptation is always there to set up another season, to keep the viewers coming back to see the things they’ve loved since the beginning of the show. This is the impetus of the reset button, that tendency to end every televised plot arc with a return to the status quo. TV shows, especially long-running, episodic ones, change at a glacial pace, if at all. The thing that has made The Office‘s Florida arc interesting is the possibility that it might just change things in a meaningful way. That’s why “Last Day in Florida” is a disappointing episode even if it’s not terribly flawed on its own.

The A-plot is fairly simple: Robert California has always hated the Sabre store idea but felt compelled to see it through because Jo, the original CEO, endorsed it, giving it good will with the company brass. Now that the store has been tested, he can deem it a failure and move on. The problem, of course, is that he has to pass the blame to an expendable employee. In this case, Dwight is on the chopping block. The episode doesn’t directly explain how Nellie isn’t in the crosshairs as well, but it has been established in the past that she has friends in high places and her job title (president of special projects) could potentially connect her to other parts of the company where she’s more useful. Dwight doesn’t know he’s taking the fall and won’t listen to Jim when Robert confides in the latter about his plans. Cue an extended bit of physical comedy as Jim literally wrestles with Dwight to keep him from entering the Meeting of Doom.

The logic at play here is fairly flawed, as it hinges on Nellie naming Todd Packer the VP when Dwight doesn’t show at the meeting. I’d like to think Jim would be smart enough to know this, or at least that the writers would take the time to explain Jim’s irrationality by underlining his weird, co-dependent relationship with Dwight. Ah, but that’s a small concern in light of the larger disappointment that is the inevitable return to business as usual. Packer takes the fall, Dwight is disappointed but still employed and everyone but Erin goes back to Scranton. Heck, even Ryan is back in town despite his dramatic, soul-searching exit last week.

The Office showrunner Paul Lieberstein recently gave an interview that shed some light on the show’s troubled 8th season. As much as I, as a fan and a critic, wanted the Florida arc to be about shaking up the staleness of the series, it seems that it was always more about spinning its wheels in an exotic locale. Lieberstein had little more than faint praise for Season 8 and focused on promises for Season 9. Though there’s still one more episode left in the Florida arc, it’s going to be about Andy’s quest to get Erin back from the nice old lady who’s currently employing her. It might be fun, even if it’s entirely rote, but it’s almost guaranteed to not be a big change. The most we’d lose is Ellie Kemper, which wouldn’t be a change for the better. More likely than not, Erin comes back with Andy and nothing really changes.

Perhaps it’s my last lingering shreds of hope and good will, but I’m still willing to give The Office a chance to do something interesting. That said, I’m fairly certain (and apparently so is Paul Lieberstein) that Season 8 isn’t where it’s going to happen. Florida could have been great, and at times it was, but it didn’t actually give The Office the shot in the arm it desperately needs.

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In the climactic scene of this week’s intriguing but ultimately problematic episode of The Office, the show provided an apt metaphor for why exactly it’s failing today more often than it’s succeeding. Jim, stepping in for Ryan, gives an all-flash, no-substance presentation to a small audience of customers and tech bloggers at Sabre’s test store. In it, the company’s new flagship product, the woefully conceived tablet The Pyramid, flashes a series of images that conspicuously don’t fit on the triangular screen. Only pyramid-shaped things (like actual pyramids) fill the screen exactly, while every other image has to tessellate awkwardly to avoid projecting empty space. It’s a clever sight gag driving home just how misguided and doomed to fail The Pyramid and Sabre are, but it’s also a reflection of the show around it. The Office is great when it does the one thing it’s any good at these days, which is deliver understated, human comedy through its talented ensemble. Everything else it tries to do just doesn’t fit, but instead of abandoning these bad concepts the show fills the screen with comic incongruity. We at home are left to focus on what’s missing.

“Test The Store” tried to turn the dramatic arcs of Dwight and Ryan into twin engines driving the plot, but it forgot to give us any reason to care about either of these things. I’ll admit that Ryan’s sudden existential crisis has a glimmer of something interesting, though it comes completely out of nowhere. Ryan hasn’t had a significant story since his disgraced tenure as a Dunder-Mifflin executive and the character has spent the past few seasons as little more than a source of hipster punchlines. There’s no reason viewers should really care what happens in his troubled head, but still that plot takes up a lot of screen time and ends inconclusively as if we’re supposed to be curious about the new chapter in Ryan’s life that starts the moment he gets on a bus to go visit his mother.

Of course, I could just dismiss this whole thing as an excuse to force Jim to do Ryan’s presentation even though he really doesn’t want to and the content ends up being extremely specific to Ryan’s life. Funny? At times, just not all that interesting since we don’t really have a reason to care much about Jim anymore, either. “Test The Store” fluctuated between embarrassing Jim for laughs (which has been his main thrust on the show for at least one whole season now) and pretending that he’s still the main character. Long ago, The Office U.S. edition had something in common with the U.K. original. It had a likable audience stand-in who was aware of and exasperated by the mix of insanity and inanity in his workplace. That show would have taken this episode and focused on the pointlessness of the Sabre store and the myopic devotion of Dwight and Nellie to its success. The show we have today didn’t seem to know whether to mock the plot or invest it with gravitas.

Which brings me to the biggest nagging question of the entire Florida arc: Why should we care about Dwight getting the promotion? Every single episode has relied on Dwight’s pursuit of the pointless VP of Special Projects position but none have given us a reason to want him to succeed or fail. Will either outcome change the show at all? Is anyone invested in Dwight as a character to the point that his aspirations matter? The character is designed to be an alien. We can’t push for him the way we once pushed for Jim and Pam because he’s too unreal. We also can’t push for him like we pushed for Michael Scott because, unlike Michael, Dwight’s goals are rarely noble and he has no innocence in him.

The Office fills its relatively short run time with a lot of things that just don’t fit anymore, if they ever fit in the first place. It doesn’t know where its heart is anymore and, most tragically, it doesn’t have a bead on what’s funny anymore. As much hope as I’ve had with the Florida episodes, the good stuff isn’t enough to overcome the inconsistency. The show is struggling to find a new voice and justify its ratings, which are dropping but still high enough to qualify it as a hit on NBC. Like Ryan running back to his mother, The Office going to Florida seems to be a desperate attempt to find its way. Unfortunately, like the utterly forgettable Scranton plot this week, the show is really just taking up space.

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Last week I griped about two early problems with The Office‘s Florida plot arc. I worried that, by dividing the action over so many locations, the show would stretch itself too thin to sustain a meaningful story. I also had a suspicion that the Florida segments would spend too much time with Dwight as the de facto protagonist. In every way “Tallahassee” was weak, “After Hours” was strong. Strangely enough, the episode was even more divided than last week’s and Dwight was still front and center for a lot of the action, but both of those elements shifted their focus to a more satisfying and ultimately more sustainable platform.

In this show’s occasional trips to a Dwight-centric universe, the failure or success of the gag has almost always been predicated on whether Dwight has a foil on hand. Whenever he went gallivanting around with Michael, The Office turned into a cartoonish buddy comedy. Left to his own devices, Dwight always takes things into untenable craziness, as in the diminishing returns of last week’s appendicitis plot. Keep him locked into somebody else’s story and things go more smoothly. That’s why Dwight’s occasional pairings with Ryan, Angela and more often than not Jim have been more solid comic territory. They balance out his weirdness with something more normal or at least low-key.

“After Hours” bats Dwight back and forth between his competition with Packer and his unwitting rescue of Jim from Kathy’s attempt at seduction during the Tallahassee crew’s first Friday night. At all times, Dwight has at least one other player to absorb his insanity and the variety does the comedy and pacing a service. His one-upmanship with Packer over the VP job is brief and surreal, evolving into a race to bed Nellie by the end of the first act. As soon as a covert poisoning with Gabe’s aid puts Packer out of commission, Nellie steps in to be Dwight’s foil. As bookends, Dwight rushes off to Jim’s room to combat a non-existent bed bug infestation Jim concocts to keep Kathy at bay. In all of these scenarios, Dwight is really just a figure in somebody else’s story instead of the hero of the episode. The man was designed to be a villain and/or a sidekick. Keeping him in two-shots is the best way to keep him entertaining.

All the episode’s darting around worked pretty well, too, on account of a cohesive theme. In each of the mini-stories playing out, romance (or more specifically, the pursuit of a hook-up) is central to the plot. In addition to the Dwight/Packer/Nellie love triangle and Kathy’s failed attempt at sexual manipulation, Ryan and Erin find themselves on a pseudo-date, the late-working Scranton folks get caught up in Darryl’s awkward bid for Val’s heart and even Stanley is carrying on a tryst on the margins of the episode. In the end, it doesn’t matter that each story barely graces the screen long enough to carry a webisode because they’re all tied together by the same idea. This also allows each multi-episode plot (the VP job, Kathy’s seduction, Erin’s escape plan, Darryl’s crush, Florida Stanley) to move forward.

Both the recalibration of Dwight and the thematically linked mini-stories illuminate how The Office or a show like it survives and thrives after the loss of its main character and thus its rudder. These things pull back to make the show an ensemble piece, generating plot and laughs by mixing and matching different characters in a wide variety of situations. Whether it’s pairing two of them off for a tense struggle or throwing a bunch of them in a room to play dialogue pinball, the show skips along at a nice clip and stays entertaining. I feel like that idea has been knocking around in the writer’s room of The Office since the end of Season 7, especially when Jim had his talking head bit about the Scranton branch running just fine without a manager.

Despite its flaws, I still really like The Office. Even minus Steve Carell, it sports one of the greatest casts in TV history and its writers are some damn funny people. The show could pull off a great ninth season if they can bring home the right lessons from the creative experiment that is the Florida arc. Afterwards, the art of televised storytelling could benefit from the struggle.

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As The Office enters the meat of its bold vacation to Florida in a clear bid to rejuvenate its wayward eighth season, the energy is there but the format is strained. “Tallahassee” is the fastest, most dense episode of the series in ages but it suffers a bit by flitting between the Florida team and the Scranton office. Stuffing all of this content into 22 minutes results in one complete plot arc, one under-explored bit and a liberal sprinkling of background jokes with a favorable hit-to-miss ratio.

The Scranton scenes are fun but pale in comparison to the comic mass of the Florida scenes. With Erin away, the reception desk is left unattended. Pam, naturally, resists resuming her purgatorial role as the mousy secretary, so in a clever power inversion Andy takes over. The strength of that initial setup is thanks to Kelly shouting at Pam and Andy to make up their minds. It adds a much-needed tension to what is clearly a foregone conclusion. Sure, there’s plenty of pathos to the idea of Pam slipping back into her old life and maybe we’ll see that surface next week, but the joke of the inept branch manager turning into a superstar receptionist is too tempting to pass up. The little touches in the plot are nice, like Andy’s fancy pen bouquet and the fact that everyone starts to find his jokes and songs amusing now that he’s not trying to be an authority figure. The resolution is a little weak, though. After beaming all day behind the desk, Andy finds himself the subject of a mini-intervention from Pam and Darryl. They try to save him from the drudgery of the lowest position in the office, but their motivation is nonexistent and the whole thing stinks of a rushed conclusion. If this had occurred in an earlier episode without having to cut to Florida so often, things likely would have had more time to build.

As for the action in Florida, it’s especially Dwight-centric despite a double guest star docket with David Koechner returning as unkillable salesman Todd Packer and Catherine Tate reprising her role as Nellie Bertram, the enthusiastically incompetent manager candidate from the end of Season 7. Nellie used her connection to Sabre’s ex-CEO Jo to carve out a job for herself as the mastermind behind the admittedly terrible idea of a Sabre retail store. I appreciate the nuance of that continuity as much as I enjoy Tate’s delivery of absurd management-speak. Her opening monologue alone is worth the price of admission. But Nellie isn’t exactly a surrogate Michael Scott. She isn’t given enough to do to serve as the shifting center of the Florida story. Dwight continues to be the prime cartoon, monopolizing the episode with his insistence on powering through a stress-induced case of appendicitis in a bid to grab a most likely meaningless vice presidency of Sabre’s retail division. This gives Rainn Wilson a chance to bring out some physical comedy, but that’s far from the best content in “Tallahassee”.

Therein lies my biggest concern for this Florida experiment. With all the talk on various red carpets and blogs about a Dwight spin-off series, I worry that this potentially exciting twist in The Office Season 8 is merely a dry run for said series. I’ve never been the biggest fan of Office episodes that give top billing to Dwight, as they tend to be loud, outlandish and completely clashing with the understated absurdity that makes the rest of the show funny. Wilson can be more interesting than the weird-for-its-own-sake material this show gives him, but putting so much of the Florida plot on Dwight means we’ll be spending less time in the plum territory of a hilariously desperate corporate retreat. There’s a lot of funny on the margins, from Jim’s sudden admiration of “Florida Stanley” to Erin’s spark of dedication to the prospect of Kathy actually getting some characterization. Making this whole exercise a Dwight vehicle would be a mistake, a missed opportunity to revitalize a flagging show.

But there are several more episodes left in the Florida arc. Next week looks like it’ll put Dwight in competition with Packer (which is inevitable), but there’s also some promise of the looming Jim and Kathy plot. We’ll also be checking in with Scranton again, which means the episode should be stretched thinner than a Fruit Roll-Up. I like the density of this setup and the show is funnier than it’s been all season, but it won’t be long before these nylon scripts start to run.

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