Two Reasons to Love and Two Reasons to Hate The Office Webisodes

Yesterday NBC released the latest round of webisodes from the world of The Office — the four-part series The Mentor, which, like previous limited series produced by the show’s production team, is a well-made little look into internal Office politics.

However, watching the surprisingly short series (four episodes at two minutes each = much more brief than past miniseries) reminded me of the conflicting feelings I have regarding their long-running foray into additional content, preceded by the hilariously fake girl band Sublte Sexuality and a series of adventures featuring the accounting crew.

Reason to Love: Lesser-used players get their moments. Steve Carell is a movie star whose success is well-deserved, Jenna Fischer and John Krasinski are the show’s emotional heart, and Rainn Wilson and Ed Helms are unsung comedic geniuses. All that talent in the room doesn’t leave a lot of space for the supporting cast, who are nonetheless just as talented as their better-known brethren. So, from the very beginning, these webisodes have been a great opportunity for Brian Baumgartner, Angela Kinsey, Oscar Nunez, and the rest to show off their stuff, and this time The Mentor pushes that even further by giving the newest cast member, Erin (Ellie Kemper), the spotlight. Already a breath of fresh air on the series, Erin proves to be fun enough in her own right to pull off a starring role.

Reason to Hate: Watching on NBC.com. It’s not a huge deal, I suppose, but NBC’s video site is personally one of my least favorite interfaces, with clunky coding and non-intuitive navigation. And unfortunately, when you go to watch the same content on Hulu, in this case the episodes were dramatically out of order on the front page, meaning that I watched them out of order initially. This sort of thing is sloppy and unfortunate.

Reason to Love: They’re well-made and funny. While not as polished or confidently directed as the broadcast episodes (which, to be fair, are sometimes directed by Oscar winners), the webisodes are consistently breezy fun, and pull out a few genuine laugh-out-loud moments. In this case, Kelly Cantley keeps the characters well-balanced, and the script by Nate Federman and Jonathan Hughes is a nice example of extremely abbreviated storytelling.

Reason to Hate: They don’t matter. To the best of my memory, there’s little-to-no crossover between Office episodes and webisodes, leaving the two entities incredibly standalone. As an example, The Mentor, which launched the same day as the airing of the highly-publicized Office baby episode, has absolutely nothing to do with the birth of Jim and Pam’s baby. Other big storylines, like Erin’s blooming relationship with Andy (Ed Helms) or the company’s recent buyout by a new corporation, are completely ignored — the four parts exist in their own charming but useless bubble.

It’s not terribly surprising that the episodes don’t mention the webisodes — after all, the TV audience for the show is huge in comparison to the web audience. But for the webisodes not to make reference to on-air events minimizes any power they might have had as a larger transmedia experience.

For Office fans, the only real reward is just an additional eight minutes of content, which hardly seems exciting enough to justify the hoopla. But these are just my reasons. What are yours?

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