The Office: The Meeting

Anyone who follows my reviews of The Office knows that I wasn’t the biggest fan of the first half of last season. So I’ve been a bit nervous that it may go down the same way this year. The premiere gave me hope, but then this episode came along and took it all away from me. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all bad.

The Meeting was about just that, a meeting between Jim and David Wallace which resulted in a meeting between Jim and Michael. Jim was proposing the idea of being promoted to Michael’s job so that Michael would be promoted to managing the entire north east region of Dunder Mifflin. The problem is we didn’t know that was what the meeting was about until about halfway through the episode. So until then all we got was Michael wandering around the office and trying to find a way to get into the meeting. It felt really disconnected and pulled back. In other words, I didn’t care what was going on. It was funny, interesting, or curious.

The side plot of Dwight and Toby teaming up to catch Darrell in what they thought was a health insurance fraud was just silly. I didn’t find it funny at all, even though Dwight and Toby are two of the funniest characters on the show.

Things started to pick up once we found out what the meeting was about. Jim is really pushing for a better job now that he has a baby on the way. I can totally see why he tried to hide his intentions from Michael, but he quickly discovered that Michael doesn’t need to know what’s going on to mess it up. I felt bad that Michael would make Jim look so bad in his meeting with Wallace. Sure, Jim hasn’t been the most productive guy over the years, but I think he has really stepped up his effort over the past season. I was disappointed, but not totally surprised, that Michael would let his insecurities get in the way of someone else’s future.

In the end things kind of worked out for the good of everyone. Michael and Jim are now co-managers. This is obviously going to be a source of conflict for the upcoming episodes. Michael and Jim will likely butt heads on more than one occasion. It should be interesting to see how that plays out. Dwight’s reaction to the news was priceless as he has basically considered himself an unofficial co-manager for years. As long as he doesn’t go into a funk like after he broke up with Angela then I think this whole situation has a lot of potential.

So the first half of the episode was painfully bad, but it turned around enough in the end that it wasn’t a total waste. I’m hoping that this sets the stage for some good comedy over the coming weeks.