The Office Review: Episode 9.17, "The Farm"

I'd really hate to be the breakout character on a sitcom. It sounds like a pretty miserable existence. The harder the writers push their breakout character, the less interesting that character becomes, as a particularly toxic sort of silliness inevitably seeps into the cracks where that interest once lied. I'd especially hate to be the breakout character of a sitcom who ends up getting his own spinoff. God, that would SUCK.

But The Office is - or used to be and is trying, with varying degrees of success, to be again - less sitcommy, and I can actually almost imagine a pretty good Dwightcentric spinoff. (Obviously, this theoretical successful spinoff would've come into existence before the ninth season.) When the news first broke about The Farm - the actual failed Dwightcentric spinoff - I knew almost immediately that this was not that spinoff. But was I being overly negative? Would it really hurt to give Paul Lieberstein the benefit of the doubt for once? After all, he was good enough when he was just a writer; he simply seems to have been promoted past the thing he excelled at, like a Mike Scully. (Or a Michael Scott, if you'd prefer your Office reviews to only use metaphors about Office things.) Perhaps he'd have an easier time reigning things if he had a project he was at the helm of from the outset? (Y'know, just like Toby's Scranton Stranger investigation came to a quick and decisive and strangly conclusion once he actually took charge of that.)

...yeah. Even though they made a modest effort to retrofit the pilot for The Farm back into The Office after the project was cancelled, let's not kid ourselves. This isn't really an Office review. This is a review of a different series altogether, one that never came to be.

One that was thrown into a casket, and then shot, just to make absolutely sure that it's not accidentally buried alive.

(Oh, yeah, beware of spoilers and stuff. And stuff.)

First things first, remember Aunt Shirley, who we literally just met in the previous episode and therefore have a deep, intense emotional connection to? Well, she's Dead Aunt Shirley now. This is used as an excuse to throw dirt on the majority of the main characters in this show. That's one way to start an episode, I guess? Always interesting to have a cold open where Dwight actually gets the best of Jim, but it's kind of an odd way to start an episode: setting up a funeral at which Dwight and
Oscar are the only two familiar characters at a (sadly not all that romantic) funeral. (Sadly, we still don't get to see her "prehensile wing".)

Yeah, it's a pretty transparent device to introduce us to the lesser Schrutes. There's his brother Jeb (Thomas Middleditch, of Professor Fartsparkles fame), who is also a farmer but - get this - he farms pot! In California! (And also, he speaks with a lisp! But only in some scenes so I'm not really sure what to make of it!) There's his sister Fannie (I hear it means something else in Britain), who is a single mom living in the city, complete with an urbane, unmanly son! And there's Cousin Zeke, who's....like Mose, but played by someone who would be willing to appear more than once or twice a season! It's definitely a more sitcommy setup than The Office itself started out with. They're characters we already feel like we already know everything about. We've been told their primary character quirks right upfront, without the room to grow that The Farm's parent show wisely gave his characters. There would've been only one possible route of progression had this gone to series: Dwight's city-dwelling siblings heartwarmingly relearn the value of good old-fashioned rural livin'. Why would I want to stick around and watch this entire series, when I've already seen it in my mind?

Because this was supposed to be a backdoor pilot (but now it's not, even though it TOTALLY STILL IS), nothing much really happens with the Schrutes even though we spend over two-thirds of the episode with them. There's the (not at all romantic, I must reiterate) funeral, a weirdly acted video will, and OF COURSE there's a scene where Dwight and the weird kid bond, thus making the weird kid less "weird" and therefore infinitely more valuable as a human being. (Sigh.) It makes sense, of course; they wanted us to get to know the characters they oh so misguidedly thought we'd be hanging out with for another 200 episodes too. Of Dwight's siblings, Fannie probably comes off the best. Partly because Majandra Delfino is kinda cute. (And also, where the Piantas live.) And partly because I like how she just happens to carry around a print-out of her poem, from the website, which makes that joke about ten times better than if it had actually been in a print publication. Zeke also feels like he makes sense here, representing the idea that there really is a place in this world where Dwight's not that weird after all. ("Dwight was obviously the cool one, and Mose was the visionary, which left me to be the comedian.") Jeb comes across as, by far, the least vital. I guess they thought having him grow pot was a joke in itself. (It's not.)

We also get to meet Dwight's (Nazi?) Uncle Heinrich for, like, fifteen seconds. Why was he even here? (One of the deleted scenes that NBC released shows that he would've also gotten to accuse Dwight of being gay, had this episode not been edited all to hell. Sigh.) And there's some chick named Esther, who is young and blonde and "hot", albeit kinda trashy-looking as Amish go. Apparently she's memorable enough for Dwight to court her, with that now-cliché crow's beak business, but it comes outta fucking NOWHERE, because we only saw her for fifteen seconds earlier in the episode too! We know she likes riding around in the back of pickup trucks, and yarn - here's your new primary love interest for Dwight, folks! That's the problem with this episode in general, really. It's paced so, so terribly. If they really still insisted on showing the results of their failed experiment with The Farm, they really should've just SUCKED IT UP AND SHOWN US THE FARM. It's really hard to bond with these characters over the course of just twelve minutes of slow-paced rural comedy, and I know they wanted to downplay the fact that this WAS originally a backdoor pilot, but not only would anyone with half a brain be able to tell anyway, by cutting this story down to the point where you don't even know a damn thing about these people, they actually made it feel MORE confusing and unnecessary.

Yeah, to make this feel more like a "real episode" of The Office, we also get a six-minute plot back at the office featuring the return of Todd Packer, a character so beloved that they only decided to let him return when they were desperate to fill six minutes of airtime with something of not very much substance. This plot was a pretty mixed bag. I thought Packer's attempts to apologize, with more insults, were pretty funny. And I guess the final reveal was amusing too, albeit pretty ludicrous. On the other hand, his character has never felt quite right with Michael Scott gone - he's so thoroughly detestable that he pretty much needs someone around to not hate him just to help it go down more smoothly. And, well, haven't we had more than enough "Kevin is stupid and dumb and will eat everything in sight regardless of the consequences" jokes for one series? Most importantly though, the pacing in this REALLY feels off, both because it's such a rushed plotline, and because it doesn't fit with the tone of the rest of the episode, not even a little. Yet Another Revenge of Todd Packer completely breaks up the flow of The Farm, and The Farm completely breaks up the flow of Yet Another Revenge of Todd Packer, and they just taste weird together. (Well, I imagine Todd Packer tastes pretty weird the vast majority of the time regardless.)

So, let's just ignore the kinda sorta almost successful side story and just focus on "The Farm", and The Farm. I've been going back and forth a lot in my head over what to rate this. There's so much wrong with it as an episode of television, on the one hand. It's awkwardly paced, with characters who are only intermittently interesting and don't have as much room to grow as you'd typically like mockumentary characters to have. Plus, if Esther is any indication, it looks like The Farm would've continued the unfortunate habit of Paul Lieberstein, Showrunner of introducing romantic subplots with women who get almost no characterization, or dialogue. (Remember Cathy? Remember Jessica? What does it tell you that I actually had to look up Andy's season-eight-girlfriend's name just to reference her?) At the same time, I can't help but feel a little sad that it didn't work out, because it feels like his heart really was in the right place - compared to the madness of Lieberstein's last season running The Office, this show looks like it would've actually been more down-to-earth, compared to my impressions when The Farm was first announced, and it just comes across as a genuinely good-natured, well-intentioned endeavor, even in its mediocrity. As such, I think I'll give it a little bit of a break and stick it right in the middle: "The Farm" gets a 5.0 out of 10!

Trivial Observations and Down-Home Country Cookin':

• This week in Athlead: Whatever it is that this mysterious corporation does, we now know that employees can easily find more than enough time to accept trendy gift cupcakes! Spending time with their wives, though....eh, not so much. Life partners are neat and all, but they're certainly no cupcakes.
• I always like it when the show acknowledges that its secondary characters' lives haven't really gone anywhere, either. Like Oscar realizing he's known Dwight for twelve years now. "Twelve years. Time is a son of a bitch."
• It was nice to see Mose acknowledged in this episode, even if he disappeared after only one scene. "Will there be ghosts?" I'll have to remember that one the next time I'm invited to a funeral I'd rather not attend!
• Similarly, Creed continues to hit his one or two bits of dialogue per episode out of the park. "I never forget a number. Names? In one ear and out the other. Places? Nope. Faces? That's rich. But numbers? I have a gift. I guess that's why I'm an accountant."
• Of everyone who had a wacky story to tell about tripping balls on cupcakes, I probably liked Clark's the best. "I went Christmas caroling. In March. And I fertilized some bushes along the way. So, not my best night. But not my worst night."
• For the first time in awhile, they released deleted scenes for this episode. I didn't really care for the one with Uncle Heinrich, like I said earlier, but I liked the other one, reintroducing us to Dwight the innkeeper. "I believe the duck was a Christian, if that's what you're asking."
• So, can anyone tell me what's the deal with the almost-black-and-white-but-not-quite filter they used on the footage of Andy and Kevin doing weird shit in a druggy cupcake-induced stupor? Have they done this on the show before? Because it doesn't really feel familiar. Or right. Were the crew (of the, um, documentary) afraid we wouldn't realize this had taken place last night, even though Andy and Kevin had dialogue over the montage that pretty much explicitly spells out that this was last night? The hell?
• For the record, though, I don't have a problem with the way they scored the last scene at the farm (of "The Farm" and The Farm fame) with "Sons and Daughters". It's a legitimate documentary technique, even if it fit better back in "The Dundies". Still, it almost makes me feel bad that this never became a series - I'm a sucker for optimistic "anything can happen now" moments, but they clearly....won't.
• In three weeks: Promos for the documentary start airing, which might be interesting, maybe, depending on how the characters react. Also, Angela is apparently jealous of Esther, which probably won't be interesting. And Jim has a meeting with Ryan Howard, the baseball player, which could be fun, but only if the writers can actually be bothered to remember that they used to have a character named Ryan Howard on the show, too. At any rate, it'll have a more singular vision than "The Farm". I think. Here's hoping?