There have been a lot of different mashup videos from The Office, especially after the show went off the air for good in 2013. There’s a Michael Scott line for every letter of the alphabet, and an official supercut of the greatest hits of Big Tuna himself.
If you want to get lost in the show — or you somehow haven’t seen it like the tourist behind me at Niagara Falls who was shocked when someone mentioned Jim and Pam (spoilers!) got married there over Labor Day weekend — ‘One Second Of Every Office Episode’ is the perfect way to take the show in without binging 201 episodes on Netflix over the course of, oh, a week or two.
The Huffington Post spotted the video on YouTube, which was posted in late August but has picked up some steam as fans of the NBC sitcom flocked to see which second is picked from every episode. Many of them are Michael Scott lines that have become infamous over the years, but the brilliance of the video is in what’s left unsaid by the brief timetable. Like a well-done Vine, fitting nine seasons of television into four minutes of video requires some sacrifices.
But in sense it’s also a fitting way to revisit the show stylistically, too. The Office was a sitcom that stood out in how often it used negative space to make great comedy. With no laugh track and a unique faux documentary film style, the awkward pauses in dialogue and Jim’s fourth wall-breaking stares into the camera were often a cue to the viewer that something was off about what was happening there.
Characters pointing out what was wrong out loud would only give away the joke, or even bring the plots crashing to a halt. But the uncertainty, or perhaps the earth-shatteringly uncomfortable nature of Michael and Dwight’s view of reality, needed to be broken up somehow. And sometimes reassuring the viewer of their thoughts was best done with a look, leaving the rest of it unsaid and filled in with laughs at home.
A trip through the video is great for any fan looking for some brief jolts of nostalgia or references to jokes they may have forgot, but it also serves as a fitting series recap as well. Hairlines change, relationships are mentioned and ended. Dwight throws up on a Trans Am. It’s a lovingly-done treatment of a show with fans who have found many ways to chop up its best moments. This one is certainly up there with the most entertaining of those tributes.
(via Huffington Post)
