Ending 'The Office': Analysing The "Happy Ever After" in Sitcoms

The Office (NBC, 2005-2013) began as a show about being ordinary, a mockumentary chronicling the employees at a mid-sized paper company. The NBC sitcom played off the humour of people doing mundane, even downright boring, things. But, over nine seasons, the office outgrew those humble beginnings. It became a phenomenon filled with increasingly larger than life characters whose storylines expanded well beyond the dreary confines of Dunder Mifflin. So, when it came time to end it in 2013, The Office demanded an equally outsized finale and the series final episode delivered over the top happy endings, heartfelt goodbyes and a sense of closure far removed from the small ordinary world that it once set out to capture. Analysing the finale episode of the US version of The Office (BBC, 2001-2003), epitomises the show’s development into the ‘feel good’ American sentimentality, with this sentimentality a natural effect from such a sustained runtime over the many years of being aired to millions.

The finale was, actually, an epilogue, catching up with the characters a year after the premiere of the documentary that had been filming them this entire time. And, as they discuss the effects of their lives becoming a TV show, The Office becomes a meta commentary on itself, contemplating its larger purpose and subtly urging us to think about how we might re-evaluate our own lives if we saw them reflected back to us on a TV screen. Here's how The Office’s once dry, subversive satire of the workplace evolved into a broad, heartfelt sitcom, and the deeper message we might take from its unabashedly sentimental ending.

The Office is the TV sitcom finale version of a happily ever after. Pretty much everyone we care about gets exactly what they've always wanted. The episode is centred on the wedding of Dwight and Angela, the couple who've loved each other the longest yet have struggled the most to find their way to shared happiness. This payoff to the show's longest deferred romantic resolution also represents the culmination of a difficult journey toward maturity for the audience's favourite oddball. By the finale, Dwight, who in the past fired a gun in the office and caused extensive damage and physical injury by faking a fire, at last earns his dream of taking control of the Scranton branch. In choosing to marry the love of his life, Angela, he's embraced the emotional side that he's always tried so hard to suppress. He's become a father at last and, in his greatest sign of evolution, Dwight has even forged a genuine friendship with Jim, turning his one-time mortal enemy into his best man. Of all the office characters, Dwight has grown the most, and when he's reunited in the finale with his former boss and father figure, Michael Scott, it is finally as equals.

For Angela, marrying Dwight represents her own growth after years of refusing to accept her own feelings. In the final season, Angela’s superficial life is shattered by her husband's decision to’ come out’ and Angela is left humbled and alone. But her experience finally enables her to recognise the friends who've always been there for her; to let go of old rivalries and to become a happier, more loving person or pretty close anyway.

Nearly every other character gets their own happily ever after, too. Michael Scott returns no longer a narcissistic attention seeker. He has finally found contentment with Holly and his new family life. Andy's quest for fame may not have turned out like he had hoped; yet it also granted him humility and led him to his dream job. Oscar has found a new calling in politics, running against the very man who ruined his friend's life. Kevin may get fired, but it's for the best as he ends up happily running his own bar while Stanley's achieved peace at last by realising his lifelong dream: retirement.

The Office’s next generation of young lovers, Pete and Erin, have found happiness while, as a surprise bonus, Erin is also reunited with her birth parents, getting the family she's always been seeking. Self-sabotaging lovers Kelly and Ryan reunite too, and while history tells us their romantic bliss will likely be short lived, the illicit drama of their running away together is their version of happily ever after or happily right now. Meanwhile, Ryan, leaving his child behind, provides wannabe mother Nellie with her perfect happy ending. And while things don't turn out so perfectly for Toby or Creed, even their stories conclude with a sense of climax, the feeling that things have turned a decisive corner. Only Meredith and Phyllis seem to have remained largely the same, but since they're also the characters who always seemed the most content with who they are, this is their version of a happy ending.

Perhaps no characters get a more extravagant happy ending than the ones that, over the years, viewers invested in most: Jim and Pam. The Office’s central couple spends much of the final season dealing with the relationship strains caused by Jim's desire to start a new career. A plotline that exposes core problems underlying their once seemingly perfect love story. Leading up to the last episode, Jim sacrifices his professional dreams to keep Pam happy. But the finale suddenly erases the need for any such compromise, or ‘either-or', after Darryl’s return makes it clear just how much Jim is missing out on. Pam, now secure about Jim’s love due to his grand gesture, is finally ready to make the leap, selling their house and moving their family cross country to pursue Jim goals. All signs suggest that Jim's glamorous new career will provide his family with excitement, wealth and adventure far beyond the boring, stable Scranton life the audience once assumed was meant to be there given lot.

What's striking about this ensemble happy ending is that it delivers a level of wish fulfilment and total closure that feels almost like fantasy, reuniting Erin with her birth parents at a point when she doesn't even really need this in her life and giving Nellie the child she's longed for in the space of the same episode seems almost cartoonishly tidy; and while it's as thorough and satisfying an ending as any could ask for, the degree of happiness in this finale is all the more striking when one considers The Office’s starting exercise: to capture the humdrum grind of everyday work life.

When the series began, it was a near carbon copy of its original British version, deriving most of its laughs from discomfort and an inappropriate unlikeable boss. However, as the show soon discovered, this only gets you so far. After all, Ricky Gervais’s The Office ran for just twelve episodes; America not only demands more episodes from its favourite sitcoms, but it also demands more likeable characters who grow and improve as people and to experience the kind of expansive storylines that reward viewers for hanging out with these characters week after week, year after year. There's a noticeable change in the tone of The Office’s second season, which saw a boost in ratings after The 40-Year-Old Virgin (Dir. Judd Apatow, 2005) made Steve Carell into a movie star. Inspired by that film’s success, Carell’s Michael Scott became less of an obnoxious creep and more of a man-child - still a tad oblivious, but lovable, in spite of himself.

At the same time, the show began to develop its secondary characters to an extent that the British series never had, giving them even more depth and recognisable personalities, conflicts and stories of their own. And while the British office had its own ‘will they or won't they’ romance, the American series leaned even more into Jim and Pam's relationship as the heart of the show, using their burgeoning romance to drive deep audience investment with multiple cliff-hangers on the way to wedded bliss; this romance was followed by multiple others that turned The Office, to a degree, into a soap operatic romcom with a changing cast of romantic leads. It was no longer a show about ordinary people doing everyday things. Nevertheless, the finale still left us with a universal message to apply to our own lives.

When series creator Greg Daniels returned as showrunner for The Office’s ninth and final season, he promised, “All questions will be answered. We're going to see who is behind the documentary.” (2013, TV Line) It was the kind of lofty declaration one might expect for a twisty mystery driven drama, not a workplace sitcom. But the final season of The Office centres itself on examining the documentary exercise itself and answering the question, ‘Why would anybody spend almost ten years filming a paper company?’

The answer we get in the ninth season premiere is really the answer as to why we, the viewers, have stuck with the office for so many years. It may have started out as a comedy about workplace drudgery, but it endured because fans grew to love its characters. By breaking and finally obliterating the fourth wall in its final season, The Office introduces a meta narrative that serves as a broader commentary on why we watch long running television and what we ought to take away from this series as it nears its end. The show spends much of its final season reflecting on itself as a work of television. It's conscious of its cultural impact and it's dedicated following.

Once the ‘documentary’ finally premieres, Jim, Pam and everyone else start to see themselves as TV characters. This knowledge makes them self-aware of their lives as a story; and it's only by using this outside reflection of themselves, and the unusual perspective it provides, that they're able to challenge themselves and complete their growth to take control of their stories and write their own endings.

Initially, Pam sees her story as already finished, but Jim isn't so sure and the show underscores Jim’s anxiety about this by introducing two new mirror characters, Pete and Clark, to remind Jim of just how long he's been stuck in that office. After Jim recognises the stagnation in his narrative, and the disappointing conclusion it's headed toward, he decides to begin a new chapter, one that threatens to rewrite the happy ending he's already found with Pam. Putting Jim and Pam on separate paths was the show's way of shaking up a relationship that had entered a natural lull, recreating the excitement of when the show had first hooked its viewers by keeping Jim and Pam apart; the idea was floated that Pam would fall for a character who predated the relationship with Jim and had been a shoulder that she cried on for years. Daniels thought this would introduce a realistic and long overdue challenge to Jim and Pam's romantic fantasy relationship. New love interests and job opportunities are realistic challenges, juxtaposed by the fact that they appear suddenly in show’s final season, they are also clearly invented conflicts that, again, call attention to the fact that Jim and Pam are TV characters. This meta-aspect is made even more explicit in the reunion panel, where Pam and Jim are asked the kind of burning questions that The Office fans have been pestering the actors with for years - most of them posed in another meta twist by the show's actual writers. And, ultimately, Pam doesn't realise, on her own, that she should trust Jim or take a chance on a new adventure; she only arrives at that conclusion once she’s forced to look at her life like it's a TV show.

As Time critic James Poniewozik wrote in his review, “All this sends a message not just to them, but to us. Live your life as if you were character you’re yelling at on TV. Embrace love and possibility... Say what you really feel to the people you love not just to a camera.” So, this meta narrative serves to underline one of the overarching messages of the series that often you need to step outside of our everyday lives in order to truly see them.

As the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami noted, “I've often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us, unless it's inside a frame.” (2016, The Guardian) Thus, for these characters, maybe the documentary is that frame, allowing them to see the bigger picture of their own stories; for us that frame is The Office - a reflection of our ordinary lives that enables us to appreciate the beauty and the joy within them.

A common criticism of The Office is that the show went on for too long. Some believed it should have wrapped up when Steve Carell left in season seven, a finale then would have offered a big sentimental payoff and brought a satisfying closure to its central character; or it could have ended with the romantic resolution of lead couple Jim and Pam getting married in season six. By pushing past these more obvious conclusions, the show forced itself to invent another ending that could measure up to same level of emotion which, naturally, meant it would feel more contrived. But, by continuing, it also emphasised one of the show’s underlying themes that, contrary to what the finale suggests, life doesn’t have a tidy ending. After their picture-perfect wedding and two children, Jim and Pam’s perfect love story still has real obstacles to overcome and unearthing and confronting them only makes it better.

Like countless comedies, going back to Shakespeare (for instance, with Much Ado About Nothing), The Office uses the construct of a big, happy wedding ceremony to bring its characters together for one last ‘hurrah’ in order to celebrate their bonds, while suggesting that everything is about to change as they all go their separate ways. So, underneath all this happiness lies the painful bittersweetness of any ending; it drives home both the importance of revelling in jubilation about our highs, highs which are inevitably ephemeral, and the impossibility of truly appreciating what we’ve got till it’s gone.

The sentimental closure that The Office’s finale provides may be at odds with the show it started out as, though there is little doubt that it helped secure the ongoing popularity of the show it became. Since leaving the air in 2013, The Office has remained among the most streamed series, let alone sitcom series, on the internet, with old and new fans alike returning again and again to spend time with their fictional friends at Dunder Mifflin. If the show had ended on a more ambiguous or cynical note, would we be quite so eager to relive that journey? After all, The Office ultimately became a sentimental show about the bonds we forge with the people we work with and the incredible love that can be found in the most mundane of places.

Bibliography:

Jürgen Kamm and Birgit Neumann (2016), 'Introduction: The Aesthetics and Politics of British TV Comedy' in British TV Comedies: Cultural Concepts, Contexts and Controversies, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Brett Mills (2004) 'Comedy verité: contemporary sitcom form'

Robert C. Allen (1995), 'Introduction' in To be Continued...: Soap Operas Around the World, ed. R. C. Allen, London: Routledge

Abbas Kiarostami Obituary (2016), The Guardian

Greg Daniels Interview on the Final Season of The Office (2013), TV Line

The Office: Reviewed by James Poniewozik (2013), Time Magazine

Filmography:

The Office (BBC, 2001-2003) Program creators: Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant

The Office (NBC, 2005-2013) Program creators: Greg Daniels, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant

The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) Director: Judd Apatow. Distributed by: Universal Pictures, Summit Entertainment