there you go kiddo, is that what you needed? a big pile of attention. now go play in your room.

but I think we all can agree, despite what NBC is trying to tell us in their promos, that KATH AND KIM blows goats

true that about comedy though, everyone has differeent tastes totally, I stated in the AMAD column, that noone should ever have to apologize for liking a movie, citing my love for Evil Dead but some friends hate of it as an example. Same with comedy, I love the original FLETCH movies (and books) but I have friends that can't watch them, think they are stupid, but will watch something I think is totally retarded and enjoy it.

Looney Tunes is 42% off, not 60%

West Wing is 57% off, not 70%

Gilmore Girls is 43% off, not 75%

The OC is 59% off, not 75%

Smallville is 60% off, not 75%

jesus christ guys...even from talkback trolls, that is a really just pathetically sad display of idiocy.

But now, I don't even know what to think anymore. This episode that just aired--it was just weird. It wasn't exactly too broad or over-the-top. I just kind of didn't get it. There were long stretches that didn't even seem like they were supposed to be funny; they just kind of happened. That's what the show has been like this season.

The formula for this season seems to be this: each show has an A, B, and C plot. Plot A is really goofy. Plot B is really sweet/sad. Plot C is--well, neither goofy nor sad; it just kind of exists.

In this episode, the 'A' plot was Michael trying to frame Toby. There was very little that we haven't seen a dozen times before: Michael irrationally hates Toby, and says so to his face. This was funny for a while, but they aren't going anywhere new with it, so why bother? Toby had been written off; we don't have a good reason, or excuse, for him returning. Michael tries to frame him by buying 'pot' that is actually a salad (a joke that I've heard too many times to laugh at) and putting it in his drawer and calling the cops. The kind of person that would find this joke funny is the probably not the kind of person who would have watched the Office two years ago. Compared with, say, the Drug Testing episode from Season 2 (which similarly centers around the idea of drugs found in the workplace), this episode is so obviously deficient in subtlety and cleverness. I did get a laugh out of Dwight's assertion that he had 'framed' a raccoon and a bear.

The 'B' Plot is that Jim has bought his parents house for Pam and him to live in. I guess this is kind of sweet--a plot thread designed to appeal to the type of person who watches shows like this for the relationships, and likes to coo at the idea of two attractive actors in love with each other. I kept thinking back to an episode a few years ago (I think the "Boys and Girls" episode, again from Season 2) where Pam mentions that she always used to have a dream that she'd have a house with a balcony, and then says how silly that dream is because there are no houses like that in Scranton, and then loses it for a moment and cries at the realization that the dreams she once had would never happen. The last few episodes seemed to acknowledge that Pam has to choose between following her dreams and being an artist or living a simple and unremarkable life in Scranton with Jim--I hope that the element of this house will bring up that tension in future episodes, and not just be a reason for certain viewers to say "how cute".

And the 'C' plot--where someone leaves a mess in the microwave, and Pam leaves a long note about it--was so underdeveloped that it's hard to say anything about it. It's this kind of mundane piece of controversy that the show used to make the center of everything, and I was disappointed that it seemed to be nothing but filler here. Anyone who has worked in an office will relate to this--the twin offenses of someone too inconsiderate to clean after himself, and someone so holier-than-thou that they feel the need to leave a long and preachy note. When you spend your whole day doing mindless and repetitive work, little situations like this take on a heightened level of drama and importance, people take sides, and feelings are hurt out of proportion to the actual offense. This is what the Office used to be about! But here, it's a good idea that's wasted: the story never goes anywhere interesting, and we never even find out who left the mess.

The Office used to be able to take insignificant little episodes like this and turn them into something greater and more touching, but I really don't feel that the writers have that level of sophistication anymore. I have been really disappointed with this show lately, and the reason is because it used to be something so special, and now it really seems to have lost its way.

The point of the microwave storyline, as I understood it, was about the different characters' attitudes about respectfulness in the office. People on both sides thought the other side was being disrespectful. Pam thought the person who left the mess was disrespecting everyone else by expecting others to clean up their mess; the other people thought that Pam was being disrespectful by leaving such a snotty note. Because neither side knew who the other was (the note and mess were both anonymous), people felt free to talk about this anonymous offender a lot more harshly and rudely than they would if they knew who they were talking about. All that is really interesting little stuff, and I think if they had focused the whole episode on the details of THAT, it could have been better in a more "Office" way. The particular "Office" brand of humor, as I see it, has a lot to do with how giant people working together make insignificant things (like the politics of the Party Planning Committee).

When I labeled the plots as A, B, and C, I wasn't trying to suggest that that was their order of importance. I just meant that the same structure of this episode applies to some others from this season--for example, the one where Dwight and Andy face off about Cornell (A: the goofy plot that's a little too far over the top), Michael and Daryl move Holly to her new home (B: the plot that's obviously supposed to tug at our heartstrings), and Jim and Pam have lunch with Jim's brothers (C: the plot that kind of hangs there, that could have been good if they'd actually done something with it).

Ryan not so subtly telling Pam to clean it up should not have been the end of that story. Something like that will sit there until someone can't stand it anymore and cleans it. I could see it becoming an issue where Michael finally steps in and orders Dwight to to an investigation to find the person responsible, then hold a kangaroo court in the conference room to convict the suspect and sentence them to a week of being responsible for cleaning the kitchen. Maybe that will be part of the deleted scenes that will be available next week (except in my region).

However, the show has drifted until it is just a sit-com. With sit-com characters, rather than with the exagerated real world figures that represented both the original British Office and the first few seasons of the US version. Seriously, some of the plots are only half a skip away from being rejected ideas from Three's Company.

and Tina Fey is just about to write a book for like $4 mil, so I think she's okay. your completely incorrect assumptions aside, she's doing fine and she's riding a big wave of success.

in other news, thegreatwhatzit declares that the Jets performed poorly this weekend.