I Like to Watch

Oct. 21, 2007 | My mom is visiting me this week, and she seems appalled and confused by the little details of my life in a way she has never been before. "Those look like they'd break very easily," she said when shown porcelain candleholders, a gift from a friend. Something in her tone suggested it would be better to just break them right now and get it over with.

When a package arrived from Fox containing a DVD of a new talk show plus a bag of marshmallows, some graham crackers and a bar of chocolate (there was a theme: S'more talk, less music? I can't remember), my mom was utterly flummoxed. S'mores? In the mail? Why? I didn't have a simple explanation. "They send TV critics all kinds of weird stuff."

"It could be poisoned," my mom said, and she wasn't joking. Forty years of motherhood have taught her to sniff out danger in the most seemingly benign places.

"'Please watch this show, then die?' They wouldn't get much publicity that way."

"I'm just saying I wouldn't eat something that came in the mail from a total stranger."

I found myself eyeing the marshmallows suspiciously. Publicists have always struck me as a nefarious bunch, so flawlessly dressed and coifed, clutching their BlackBerries, smiling manically and insisting that I give them my honest opinion of a very bad show they're promoting that month.

"People used to send anthrax in the mail," my mom added, as if it were once a widespread trend. "It just doesn't seem safe."

Insane in the membrane
I laughed at my mom and repeated the story over and over to my husband and my brother and my sister-in-law, the perfect illustration of how unhinged she is these days. Then I took the marshmallows and the graham crackers and the chocolate bar and threw them in the trash.

Because insanity, like good comedy, always has a grain of truth to it. Even paranoid schizophrenics can be very convincing, under the right circumstances.

My mom would make a great sitcom character, particularly today, when TV comedies are less focused on jokes and more focused on characters and situations that have a heavy current of truth running through them. The "Full House" template of comedy, in which characters didn't need to be realistic or relatable, but just needed to spout punch lines with lots of googly-eyed enthusiasm, has officially expired. Comedy today centers on odd yet familiar characters, people you've met before, who remind you of your sister or your friend or even yourself. Michael Scott from "The Office," Celia Hodes from "Weeds," Jack Donaghy from "30 Rock" -- these are characters who, however bizarre, bear a closer relation to real people, in all of their neurotic, quirky glory, than do the relatively heroic and noble characters that populate most TV dramas.

Whether they're bored office workers, bickering anchormen, lustful nerds or suburban pot dealers, whether they're arrogant blowhards, mumbling introverts, scattered, self-involved moms or hedonistic writers, the characters on today's best comedies are as strange and bumbling and deluded as you and I. Those poor, poor people.

The paper chase
NBC's "The Office" (9 p.m. Thursdays) has always trafficked in characters and stories awkward enough to be real, and the fourth season has so far matched the nasty delights of the first three. The running joke of the series is that, for all of our bluster, American workers don't get much done. Instead, we plan office parties and try desperately to get through the day without thinking about (let alone doing) any work at all.

One recent episode opened with the troops at Dunder Mifflin assembled for a meeting in the conference room. Strangely enough, everyone seems to be listening closely to the bossman, Michael (Steve Carell). Then we cut away to Jim (John Krasinski), who explains that they're all watching the "DVD Video" logo bounce around on the screen next to Michael:

"This cube on the screen, it bounces around all day, and sometimes it looks like it's heading right into the corner of the screen, and at the last minute it hits a wall and bounces away. We're all just dying to see it go right into the corner."

When the cube finally goes into the corner, everyone smiles and claps and says "That was so awesome!" Mistaking the applause as a response to his great idea, Michael tells the camera, "Some days I am just on fire."

After loving the original BBC series starring Ricky Gervais, it was tough for most of us to imagine that an American version could ever compare to it. But the writers of this series have done a great job of creating a show that quickly developed a life of its own.

This season, Ryan's (B.J. Novak) rapid conversion from temp worker to slick executive is a transformation that should be hauntingly familiar to anyone who spent the mid-'90s at a dot-com company, surrounded by recent graduates marching around in brand-new Prada loafers, playing make-believe at wheeling and dealing. Ah, those were halcyon days indeed, alternately basking in the limitless potential of expanding global markets and sweating over the very real possibility of sudden bankruptcy.

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