When the cast and producers of The Office complains about the fatigue and strain that comes from being asked to supersize and add episodes to fill out NBC’s otherwise dead air, you can really see the fatigue on screen in Moroccan Christmas. Moroccan Christmas is an episode that feels tired from the start, and not so much because it captures the ennui of being in an office, as because it’s a tired and listless production that reminds you of a dog trotting out the same weary performance at a dog show once again, no longer in the hopes of getting a biscuit or a pat on the head, but just to get the whole thing over with.

Beginning with Phyllis throwing a wacky Moroccan themed Christmas party, Moroccan Christmas is an episode stumbling around in searching of something funny, and never finding it. After a few minutes of trying to milk whatever humor could be found in Phyllis serving dishes with obscure names, Meredith dances around and sets her hair on fire. Naturally Michael digs up a joke from the 90’s and throws an intervention.

But Moroccan Christmas can’t even commit to the tired trope of Michael doing wacky routines at some sort of event he only knows about from television, instead the intervention dies out quickly, leading into an attempt to forcibly commit Meredith, the closest thing to funny the episode ever collides with, and ends uncomfortably as Phyllis spills Angela and Dwight’s affair out, leading to more uncomfortableness, and not much of anything else. When you watch Moroccan Christmas, you can’t help but see the point of the people who say that the American Office should have been as short as the UK Office. Because this is just tired.

Since half the cast of The Office are also its producers, nobody leaves the show for very long, at least nobody who’s a producer. So Ryan left briefly only to return again and Toby is back too, with Holly’s departure in The Office 5x08 Frame Toby. Naturally Michael reacts much as you would expect and tries to get rid of Toby in just about every way possible. With a premise like that you would think that The Office 5x08 Frame Toby would actually be a much funnier episode than it is.

Of course The Office 5x08 Frame Toby has its moments, from Dwight identifying himself as a volunteer sheriff’s deputy to the arriving police officers to Michael trying to purchase weed from some of Bob Vance’s employees, but it never really delivers the kind of comedy you would expect. A sizable part of the problem is that the Jim and Pam storyline is now a serious drag on episode after episode, that mires it in mundane and unfunny material. This week Jim shows Pam the house he bought for her, it’s got shag carpeting and a clown picture on the wall he can’t remove, she loves it anyway. The end. That kind of thing makes you wonder when The Office became 7th Heaven or Providence.

Dwight also continues to be underused for several episodes now, the actor may be less available because he’s doing more movies, but the lack of screen time is taking a toll. The Office does not have that many basically funny characters, subtract Dwight and you’re left with Creed and Michael, and since Creed is best taken in small doses, that means we’re left with Michael. The Office worked best when it dynamically balanced its cast. When half the episode is Jim and Pam’s happy untroubled relationship and the other half is Michael flailing on his own, it just does not work out.

The Office 5x07 Business Trip is another decent if not particularly exciting episode that nevertheless stays fairly true to The Office’s roots but becomes a little too mired in soap opera storylines. The Office S5E07 Business Trip isn’t particularly funny or really at all, it’s not even written as if it’s supposed to be funny, more offbeat and weighed down with way too many stories involving The Office gang cheating on each other.

This is kicked off with Kelly and Ryan awkwardly getting back together after a one minute stand in the closet while Andy continues to be clueless about what Dwight and Angela are doing despite a drunken bar phone call from The Huntsman by Andy to Angela demanding naked conversation, even as Dwight can be heard in the background. If this sounds more like a soap opera than a sitcom, well you have a point. Between Jim and Pam, Angela, Dwight and Andy’s triangle, Michael and Holly and now the return of Kelly and Ryan, we’re far too deep into soap opera territory than is healthy for a TV show that airs at night and is supposed to be a comedy, and not the Suddenly Susan or Samantha Who kind.

Business Trip does have its moments, particularly Michael’s breakdown on the phone to David Wallace and Jim and Pam’s parking lot reunion, but it’s an episode that’s short on funny and long on drama. Part of this is caused by turning the spotlight on Oscar, a painfully boring character, and turning it off Dwight, but mostly it’s caused by a focus on relationships, some of which pays off in Andy and Oscar’s interaction, but mostly plunks away into a deep and dark barrel.

The Office 5x06 Customer Survey takes a plausible enough concept, a customer survey finding issues with some of the sales staff, and then doesn’t do very much with it. Some episodes of The Office feel positively overstuffed, and some like Customer Survey seem barely there. The Customer Survey of the title is conducted and scores Jim and Dwight fairly low, forcing them to sort of team up to expose the real story behind their low rankings.

There are a handful of funny moments in The Office 5x06 Customer Survey, but it really is a handful, and while the concept of Jim and Pam on the phone to each other using the bluetooths is mildly cute, it doesn’t really go anywhere either. Meanwhile the increasingly unpleasant story arc of Dwight, Angela and Andy’s triangle drags on as the wedding approaches, at which point we can assume the whole thing will finally implode, hopefully inspiring a violent nervous breakdown from Andy, who has become boringly milquetoast.

Besides Jim and Dwight’s training phone call and Pam’s chance to say, “That’s what she said”, The Office 5x06 Customer Survey is an episode with very little to offer. Attempts to generate suspense through Pam’s conflict over staying in New York is a failure, and the entire Pratt storyline got old and annoying weeks ago. Season 5 has done a good job of reconnecting with the spirit of the series’ early seasons, but it does need to actually begin going somewhere again.

With The Office having lost one tragic hopeless couple with Jim and Pam whose relationship is grinding along fairly naturally, the inevitable thing to restore the luster of The Office’s earlier seasons was to create another one, or another two if you want to count Dwight and Angela, but the focus of The Office 5x06 Employee Transfer is Michael and Holly who are either breaking up or setting up shop as the tragic couple who are meant to be together that viewers are supposed to root for. The Office is a natural enough series and its plots are so plausibly organic that it can be hard to guess, even when the objectives are likely to be so cynical.

So The Office 5x06 Employee Transfer gives us the journey of Michael and Holly driven by Daryl for 7 hours across state lines and emotional lines, intercut with two mediocre stories, one of which has Pam meeting Jim’s brothers for 6 minutes that will bore everyone and their cat, and Dwight tormenting Andy by pretending to be interested in Cornell, a generally pointless sequence that has Dwight taking on Jim’s behavior traits and acting out of character. It makes for the occasional funny clip but the whole thing just feels strange and too unwieldy like a joke taken too far.

It’s Michael and Holly’s journey with Michael experiencing some real emotions to the extent that even Daryl feels sorry for him that holds The Office 5x06 Employee Transfer together. It’s not a great episode but it does give Michael a decent storyline that doesn’t involve him throwing bizarre events every other week at the office, which is the kind of thing the series has beaten to death and straight into a coma years ago and though Holly as Michael squared may be quite irritating, it’s perfectly plausible that this is his journey after all.

The Office 5x05 Crime Aid continues The Office’s success at returning to its roots in the early seasons with an episode that keeps it simple by focusing on the small interactions of the show’s characters. The episode’s concept is simple enough and grounded in the kind of thing that is an entirely plausible event in an office as Michael and Holly developing relationship leads them to a liaison that leaves the office wide open for a robbery that picks up Oscar’s laptop and Kevin’s surge protector among other things.

The second half of the episode does however revert to type by having Michael come up with a wacky event inspired by his misunderstanding of pop culture to deal with the problem which in this case involves throwing a Crime AID auction based on tickets to Bruce Springsteen that don’t actually exist. Still The Office S05xE05 Crime Aid handles even this fairly well with only a few clumsy attempts by Michael to do an auctioneer routine, which unlike the more complicated routines we’ve been treated to is more true to life and to Michael’s talents, and provides a decent save with Bob buying a hug from Phyllis for a cool grand as he’s competitively bid up by Dwight and Andy, both of whom feel the chill from Angela.

While The Office 5x05 Crime Aid showcases Michael and Holly’s developing relationship, Angela, Andy and Dwight’s triangle and Jim and Pam’s deteriorating connection, both real and telecommunicationwise, they’re full of small quiet moments that ground them in reality unlike the more soap opera relationship centric episodes of the previous two seasons. Whether it’s Phyllis giving Dwight some relationship advice or Jim turning back on the highway or Michael and Holly planning for what they’ll do on their diet, The Office 5x05 Crime Aid is full of quiet rhythms that play a familiar song.

The Office 5x04 Baby Shower continues to reclaim the spirit of the first two seasons with a surprisingly deeply felt episode which despite outwardly focusing on the return appearance of a still deranged Jan, itself an artifact of the far weaker last two seasons, does a good job of moving the journey of the characters along.

Still despite Jan’s antics, The Office 5x04 Baby Shower is really more of a throwback to classics that form the best of The Office such as a Benihana Christmas. It’s not the great episode ever or even the season but it redeems itself by going back to a version of Michael who is actually learning something, instead of reverting to a Homer Simpson clown who does insane things because that’s the only way the show knows how to get laughs anymore. And in that way the US version of The Office stays at least somewhat marginally true to the UK version of The Office.

While initially The Office 5x04 Baby Shower appears to be replaying the same old gag of Michael behaving insanely, which is certainly the impression to be derived from an opening that has Dwight recreating the hypothetical birth of Jan’s baby, only to then go over the top in planning the party, but this isn’t Michael deploying an entire carnival outside or having a pointless race or trotting out some stereotype to make fun of in a practiced skit, it’s Michael trying to get what he wants out of life and realizing that the way he’s gone about getting it is all wrong. It’s the impulse that in Benihana Christmas pushed him to go on vacation with Jan and while that relationship crashed and burned horribly, it’s what pushes him to realize that he’s smashing his head against the wall of a dead end and leads him to kiss Holly instead.

After the two part opener The Office gets back to business with its first regular Business Ethics. Overall the quality so far for Season 5 is a lot more even than the messy Season 4 and while The Office s5e03 Business Ethics is nothing special, it’s functional enough. For one thing while it keeps Michael’s antics under control and grounds them within a more realistic workplace scenario, instead of having him do something insane like setting up a carnival outside the Office or a race for an imaginary charity.

The Office 5x03 Business Ethics also brings back the Michael of Season 1 in other ways by focusing the episode on the whole family vs workplace dichotomy that is at the heart of Michael’s behavior or misbehavior, bringing him into conflict with Holly. It’s the Michael who’s lazy and careless but cares about his employees, if only because they’re extensions of his need for a family, and who has to function within a corporate environment. Holly is still annoying, but she’s a little more out of the Poochy mode mostly and a little closer to functioning like a normal human being.

Jim and Dwight are back to their usual antics throughout all this and Dwight’s retort to Andy is still the highlight of the episode, which once again puts Dwight back into the place where he belongs, ruthless and yet grounded. If this trend continues predicting that the shark jump at the end of Season 4 was the end of The Office might have been premature. The celebrity director blitz for The Office continues with Jeffrey Blitz of Rocket Science directing The Office 5x03 Business Ethics.

The Office returns for a fifth season opener that plays out a lot like the fourth season finale that should have been but never was. It’s almost as if The Office writers understood what a mess Goodbye Toby and much of the fourth season of The Office was and tried to avoid repeating it by getting back to the show’s roots.

It’s not that The Office 5x01 Weight Loss is a triumph by any means, but the concept of a season opener stretching across the summer months is a nice idea and provides some breathing room and the episode scales back some of the insanity of the fourth season to ground everyone’s behavior in the more real life emotions and human interactions that made the show work in the first place. Let’s face it The Office is on the average not all that funny compared to the top sitcoms of the past. What made it work was emotional realism coupled with absurdity and Weight Loss gets back to delivering some of that.

Some of the old jokes are still being hammered into the ground and Michael’s relationship triangle with Jan and Holly reminds you of everything that’s wrong with the show in the first place, but most of the episode from Ryan and Toby’s returns to the proposal to the weight loss preoccupation are more of a throwback to the way The Office used to be. Of course you can’t have a 40 minute plus Office without Michael donning a wacky costume and being politically incorrect, but it’s a short interlude that reminds us that Weight Loss isn’t Fun Run. It’s actually a pretty decent and funny start to a hopefully better season.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that The Office started out as a scrappy midseason replacement that was down in the ratings before it was swept up as America’s leading cultural sitcom and a Presidential candidate was jokingly citing Dwight Schrute as a potential VP candidate. And The Office 4x14 Goodbye Toby is a good reminder of how far The Office has come from that scrappy series. It’s big business and self-congratulatory and worst of all unfunny.

The Office has often been unfunny, painfully unfunny and awkwardly funny; but Goodbye Toby is simply a lead balloon filled with reruns of jokes that we had seen before, it stumbles along and disappoints everyone from casual viewers to steady fans. Probably the best metaphor for how badly The Office s4e14 Goodbye Toby fails is the arrival of Holly, otherwise known as Poochy. The Office has been good at bringing in and disposing of characters on the show before. In Season 3 it introduced and then disposed of half a dozen people without blinking an eye and left only one on board. And the way they did it was slowly and naturally, but slowly and naturally is exactly what Holly’s arrival isn’t, it’s loud, it’s self-congratulatory and it’s filled with all the desperate attempts to make Holly cool and to get viewers to like her, that made Poochy’s arrival so annoying and unfunny.

By the time Michael delivers a bombastic speech about Holly’s greatness the viewer can’t help but cringe and wonder how The Office got this bad or mourn the removal of Toby and Ryan, two great characters who made the show work and their replacement by a character who clearly belongs in a sitcom. Yet The Office was never really a sitcom, which is why Holly’s integration is so unworkable… but throughout The Office 4x14 Goodbye Toby, what has clearly happened is much worse. The Office isn’t a sitcom, but Goodbye Toby dives far into soap opera territory instead.

With one proposal, one near proposal, one budding relationship between Michael and Holly we’re obviously supposed to cheer for, one returning ex with a pregnancy revelation and the final moment that shows us an uncomfortable Dwight and Angela going at it in the office, Goodbye Toby is an elaborate soap opera episode that occasionally tries for a joke and misses it by a mile. The Office has always been about the characters but Goodbye Toby seems desperate to throw relationships at viewers until they find one they care about. It’s the oppose of last season’s organic finale. Instead it’s desperate and it smacks of Desperate Housewives.

The producers of The Office no doubt know that Jim and Pam were a major reason the show was embraced by people who wouldn’t otherwise be sitting to watch the series. But they’ve underestimated their audience with Goodbye Toby. Everything from Holly to the soap opera twists is an attempt to cater to the Grey’s Anatomy audience the series is competing against, but in doing so The Office is trying to get an audience they don’t have and in doing so risk losing an audience they do have.

The Office 4x17 Job Fair follows three groups of employees, Michael, Oscar, Darryl and Pam who head to a local High School for a job fair, Jim, Andy and Kevin who head to play golf with a potential client and Dwight and Angela who stay in the office when everyone else deserts the place beginning with a still rebellious Stanley. The Office s4e17 Job Fair is less of a comedy driven episode and more of a character piece showcasing them as they go through the long day of their particular futile errands as no one at the job fair has any real interest in interning at Dunder Mifflin, no one cares about work at the office but Dwight and Angela and the client at the golf course just isn’t biting.

The Office, like Paul Feig’s Freaks and Geeks, is often a study in social awkwardness and learning life lessons from futility and The Office 4x17 Job Fair falls precisely in that area and while it’s not particularly funny, it has its share of poignant moments, particularly when Angela and Dwight work in the loneliness of the empty office exchanging only a handful of words between them and investing a great deal of meaning into them.

The golf game though mainly falls flat until the actual ending of it provides the lesson that it was meant to teach, but that doesn’t make the six or seven minutes leading into that any easier to yawn through, little relieved by weak comedy bits focusing mainly on Andy that never quite work, whether they are verbal or physical.

The Job Fair, the core of the episode after which it is named is even worse. We have a rerun of Michael’s craziness of the kind we’ve seen before and it plays like a dumbed down version of Michael’s convention routine. Michael has increasingly become the Homer Simpson of The Office with episodes structured around this week’s crazy antics and we’ve seen him pull this brand of crazy before and none of it connects.

The Office s4e12 Did I Stutter brings a bit of a welcome grounding back to Season 4 of The Office that has seen Michael become increasingly cartoonish and out of touch with any concept of reality. The Office 4x12Did I Stutter is far from the funniest episode this season and indeed from the deleted scenes, what little there was in the way of funny got trimmed, but from Stanley’s slap down of Michael, Michael finally acting like an adult for approximately 2 seconds, Ryan and Toby persecuting Jim and Pam feeling uncomfortable in The Office when she has to wear glasses and winds up beset by Michael and the other women and finally Dwight berating and belittling Andy out of his SUV only to flip it on eBay, it’s a look at realistic life in an office that is significantly more realistic than The Office has been in some time.

A lot of The Office 4x12 Did I Stutter is more uncomfortable than funny, but uncomfortable has been part of The Office tradition and The Office 4x12 Did I Stutter returns to the tradition of the original UK Office and the first two seasons of the American office, showcasing the life of the office drone, the discomfort, the backstabbing, the ways that you have to find to make life worth living when working at a pointless job that has no future and with people who are downright insane.

As The Office has given viewers the Pam and Jim relationship they want and amped up the caricature factor on the characters on The Office beginning with Michael, The Office has grown cartoonish, detached from any kind of workplace reality and just a chance to see Michael and the wackier gang go through their antics, something that has been particularly a problem on Season 4. When Stanley challenges Michael and tells him off, forcing Michael to actually remember what he’s supposed to be doing, it’s a reminder that the show is taking place in some analogue of the real world and when Ryan and Toby come down on Jim, it’s a step back to what made Jim an appealing character, as an individual who doesn’t quite fit in a senseless workplace whose pointlessness he is well aware of. The bitterness, the backstabbing, the sabotage, the formal warning bring in a little of Office Space and keeps The Office a little further away from turning into just another sitcom where nothing matters but the punchline and reality is as far away as the evening news.

B.J. Novak’s writing turn on The Office restores some of the classic mix of pathos, absurdity and awkwardness that characterized Michael and the Office at its best in its early episodes with S4e10 The Chairmodel that begins with Michael falling in love with a catalog model sitting on an office chair and ends with him standing at her grave. Michael, when done right, has always walked that fine line between relatability and insanity that genuine comic characters have. This season beginning with Fun Run, Michael has slid too far down the Homer Simpson precipice of engaging in insane behavior for its own sake. The Chairmodel redeems that a bit while jettisoning the whole Jan relationship to put Michael back where he was all along, a self-centered shell of a man looking for a relationship who can’t actually relate to anyone.

Penned by Mindy Kaling, Night Out, is another fairly decent episode, albeit one that gives Ryan an unnecessary drug problem and paints him as a failure, maybe as a prelude to bringing him back on the show in his old rule. Storyline one that has Michael and Dwight heading off to party with Ryan in New York has its comic twists, as it leans on Michael’s weird man-crush on Ryan and his ongoing loneliness, even as Dwight manages to score with a New Jersey state basketball player but disdains her attentions. Storyline two that has Jim’s plan to sneak into the office and get the work done so their saturday is free, melt down is more awkward than funny. The tone loosely does remind you of Season 1 but with no real point or payoff to it, until Toby comes close to admitting his crush on Pam and announces he’s moving to Costa Rica, climbs a fence and makes a getaway. The tie in has Michael replicating Jim’s “It was a good day” by the side of a coked up sleeping Ryan.

The Office does Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf as Jim and Pam and Andy and Angela come over to Michael and Jan’s house for a dinner party that goes pretty much the expected route. Michael and Jan have always been somewhat of a dysfunctional couple but the writers had sent Jan way too far around the bend a year ago already and by now she’s nearly in a state of full blown psychosis.

So true to the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf type of narrative, the dinner party consists of Michael and Jan bickering in increasingly obvious ways while trying unsuccessfully to hide the whole mess beneath a thin veneer of domesticity, as Michael shows off his 9 inch Plasma TV and Jan’s candlemaking business, which she recruits him to get Jim and Andy to invest in. It’s a very unhappy home and halfway through dinner Jan has a CD of a love song written by her former assistant Hunter who may have written a song about a one night stand with her, it’s a short route from there to the Dundie being thrown at the TV, a police complaint and Michael going off with Dwight.

I can well believe that s04e13 had a great table reading but it’s a weak episode, taking place mainly outside the office and involving a limited number of the cast. Like a lot of The Office’s episodes, it manages to make you uncomfortable but that’s about it. The talents of most of the cast are wasted and Michael and Jan’s unfathomable relationship ran out of mileage even before it started.

Pretty much everything you thought it would be and even less about sums up this episode, which seems to have taken Legal Lady’s blog right down to the That’s What She Said and turned it into an episode. Compared to Survivor Man from Paul Feig and Steve Carrell, The Deposition drags and has nowhere to really go. After Branch Wars and Survivor Man, The Deposition is so lost for a plot that it drags in an office ping pong game, an idea that seems like it was lifted from WKRP or NewsRadio, except it would have been funny there.

As it turns out the funniest parts of the Ping Pong game involving Creed turning it into Strip Pong were deleted anyway, just leaving us with an episode of slightly psychotic behavior from Pam and in which even Dwight’s obsession with Ping Pong doesn’t play well, mainly because the writer Lester Lewis seems to have forgotten that part of what makes Dwight funny is that aside from psychotic things and sales, he really isn’t good at much.

Meanwhile the deposition scenes themselves drag almost as much as is humanly possible. Aside from the “That’s What She Said” scenes it’s occasionally uncomfortable in that way which The Office occasionally tries to pass off as funny, but they lack even the spectacular discomfort of the best scenes of their kind. The Deposition simply needs to be thrown out.

Well with every 30 minute episode The Office continues showing that it’s best at doing 30 minute episodes rather than one hour episodes after all, actually it’s something like 23 minute episodes vs 39 minute episodes but who’s really counting anyway?

The comedic timing and the interaction is great in Survivor Man, it’s fundamentally a Michael episode and though his movie attempts may be an embarrassment, Steve Carrell carries the part on his back the way he always does. Admittedly the redundancies are getting to be too much. We’ve just had way too many episodes that hinge on insane behavior by Michael, especially on insane behavior he derived from a TV show, but Survivor Man is less about insane behavior than about Michael trying to get to know himself, which would have worked better if he had come out of it with some new understanding the way he seemed to be on the verge of doing in Fun Run.

Still Dwight’s superior insanity manages to carry the day as Dwight is in his element running through the forest and stealing eggs, watching Michael through a rifle scope, trying to knock him out with a shoe and vowing to let him die rather than come to his aid and finally coming to his aid anyway in a display of that creepy manlove that Dwight seems to harbor for Michael and Michael for Ryan.

Meanwhile continuing this season’s theme for Jim, Jim has to face growing up, does it and then decides he doesn’t want to do it.

Well the Office turns out a pretty decent second half-hour episode with The Finer Things Club. The premise of the Finer Things Club itself is not particularly amusing, except for the way that the other co-workers play off it. It’s also not exactly plausible that the Office would have three people who could discuss an E.M. Forster novel intelligently, let alone even read him, particularly Pam who works as a receptionist and never even graduated college suddenly producing virtual essays on themes in a novel. Sorry but that one is pushing it.

It does however give Andy the chance to be funny again as he redirects his social aspirations to the silliest places, while Michael has a hysterical reaction to Toby in a bow tie and carrying tea cups. Overall though The Finer Things Club gives Stanley a chance to be funny by simply not being funny. Another insane idea by Michael is a little wearying at this point, but the mustaches and the walkie talkie do help redeem it. It’s cleverly played and there’s no question that Joss Whedon is great at handling comic timing. Overall a good episode.

Written by B.J. Novak (Ryan) and directed by Jason Reitman, son of Ivan Reitman, Local Ad never quite gets up to speed but it does manage a heartwarming ending about losing but still winning, that suggests Season 1 and 2 more than anything else. This is the first half hour of the season and the production and editing doesn’t seem to have adapted. The entire much hyped Dwight Second Life storyline goes nowhere, I suspect there’s a lot of deleted scenes that will fill that in.

The ad campaign itself is plausible and suggests the new Dunder Mifflin team are at least making the effort. On the other hand, despite his insanity, Michael is supposed to be heading up the entire northeastern division of Dunder Mifflin, so why is there another office in Buffalo and why does he have so little authority.

The question to make that commercial his own is cute. The ad guys produce a dumbed down ad while Michael rips off every AT&T and IBM and MCI commercial cliche he can and stuffs it into one surprisingly workable commercial, he just doesn’t understand the difference between selling a brand using a commercial and selling using a more specific sales oriented approach to promoting a business. The ads guys were doing the latter, while Michael was imitating the brand puffery of the big telecoms, sincere as it might have been.

Written and directed by Paul Lieberstein, Money 4x04 is the last of the first wave of Office one hour long eps and probably the best so far. From Dwight’s demented family far, to growing intimacy between Jim and Pam, to Dwight’s breakdown and Jim’s chat with him in the stairway to Michael’s telemarketing job, Money is in many ways a prototype of how to get the hour long episode right. For one thing unlike Fun Run it moves smoothly from Storyline to Storyline, it doesn’t stumble and it focuses on the fun. When you look at the deleted scenes from 4x04 Money, you see scenes that actually weren’t funny or didn’t work. This is a change from many episodes where the deleted scenes are actually funnier than the ones that made it in.

Granted this is a further step along the infantilization of Michael, but at least this time around there seem to be actual consequences in the form of debt. Granted there’s no mention of it by next episode and Michael offers to do the followup ad on his own dime, but still the conclusion suggests that Jan may be remembering that she has to grow up all over again, mainly because Michael never will, while the Pam, Jim, Dwight situation harkens back a bit more to the way things were in Seasons 1 and 2 and the better episodes of Season 3, a feel that the Office has often been missing in the last two years in the scramble for more “Michael does something wacky” episodes.