NBC may want the show to return — it’s still its highest-rated sitcom — but it’s not clear anyone else involved really does. Without Carell, “The Office” took a few months to find its rhythm, but it has taken longer to find its identity, a reason to fight NBC’s strong desire for it to stick around.

In its first post-Carell season, “The Office” has been … fine.  To be fair, before Carell had left, the show was often no more than fine, an all but inevitable circumstance for a sitcom getting on in years. (TV shows age more or less like dogs do). But if “The Office” was not as sharp, uncomfortable or hilarious as it had initially been — if it veered too often toward the sentimental — with Carell it was still structurally and emotionally the show it had always been. If you become less enamored with a good friend the longer you know him, he’s still your friend. You don’t stop hanging out with him just because you know most of his jokes.

But with Carell gone, the just OK-ness of “The Office” has become more egregious. The Robert California character, who appeared so promisingly at the end of Season 7, flush with that particular deranged and sexy James Spader magnetism, has been something of a whiff. California is an imperturbable jerk with unclear motivations. Calm and irrational, he descends on the Scranton branch and wreaks havok on its already high-strung members. California is like a deus ex machina in human form, if this particular deus was dispatched only to make sex jokes and try out nonsensical business practices. (The more recently added Nellie Bertram is not much better: Why is she so ridiculous? If we don’t know, we can’t care.)

Ed Helms, whose Andy Bernard replaced Carell’s Michael Scott as the head of the branch, is, like Carell, a sweet, affectionate presence. Andy arrived in Season 3, a nasty guy with anger management issues who relentlessly teased Jim “Big Tuna” Halpert (Krasinski) and was in a doomed year-plus relationship with Angela (Angela Martin) that was never consummated. Since then, he has transformed into a puppyish fellow who loves a capella and answering the phone, who has trouble standing up for himself. Of everyone in the office, Andy, like Michael, most wants to be liked: Unlike Michael, he does not have the hubris and lack of sense to be blindly offensive and embarrassing.

Andy may have been the right solution to replace Michael, but he hasn’t filled the vacuum. There’s no tent-pole character anymore, or even really a first among equals. This has given the other deserving, supporting actors more of a showcase, but has made the whole season feel a bit like a string of (some funny) B-stories. Even one of the season’s A-story lines, Andy’s romance with Erin (the fantastic Ellie Kempner; never has weird been so adorable), has been more rote than romantic. We’ve already seen not one, but two couples go through this arc. First, and best, there was Jim and Pam — but Andy and Erin are far too sitcom-weird to ever be as believable and moving as them. And more recently there was Michael and Holly (Amy Ryan) — but since Andy’s so much more normal and romantically viable than Michael, he and Erin’s union could never be as triumphant.  Michael finding his match was a miracle; Andy and Erin hooking up is just nice.

Though it would have you forget it, “The Office” is a show about a group of clock-punching paper salesman, who are ambitionless or who have subsumed their ambition in a sort of tragic way (here’s a great piece on the sadness of Jim Halpert) or perverted it in a crazy one. (See: Michael and Dwight.) In the original British version of the series, scenes were intercut with Xerox machines xeroxing and printers printing so that the audience never forgot the dullness of office life. The people working there might be funny, but they were still drones.

The American version of “The Office” relegated the depressing qualities of office work to the deep background. Working at Dunder Mifflin may be frustrating and absurd, but it’s never boring, never even uncreative. There are too many zany meetings to attend, complex pranks to pull off, wacky characters to cope with, and theme parties to plan. But in trying to make “The Office” work without Carell, a drone vibe is coming through. The characters may all still work in an engaging nut house, but the series is punching the clock, trying to solve the same old problems, create similar stories, develop familiar characters. “The Office” is still competent enough at its job — the one of making people laugh — but it’s not as good, energetic or original as it once was. Maybe that’s why so many people who work there are calling in sick.

There are times when he casually shatters his employees’ confidence simply because he’s a powerful man who’s used to saying whatever pops into his head without fear of punishment. (When he prompted Andy to talk about his attraction to Erin, and Andy obliged, California cut him off with, “I’m afraid you’ve lost my interest.”) But so far there’s no indication that he’s anything but fundamentally decent; based on last week’s Halloween episode, during which he brought his son to work, he’s also a good dad with a deep (if unusual) connection to his child. He’s not a craven, impulsive, inadvertently destructive person, as Michael often was. He’s wry and aloof. He seems to view the goings-on at the Scranton branch from a lofty perspective — including the reflexive ass-kissing that greets his every pronouncement, no matter how whimsical or baffling. His visits to the Scranton branch are charged with an excitement that no other regular “Office” character ever summoned, and it’s not just because he’s the CEO. His peculiar energy sparks love and respect as well as fear. (Andy greeted him by blurting out, “Hi, Dad.”)

“The Office” loses something by having Spader’s Zen master drive the action instead of Michael Scott. When Michael was running things, the Comedy of Discomfort flowed naturally, but with California in charge, it doesn’t — not quite. And when the series ventures into that old, familiar vein (see the garden party episode, which was more silly than mortifying) the discomfort is mild compared to, say, “Dinner Party” or some other Michael Scott-era exercise in cringe humor. I don’t mind, though. Seven seasons of the show showcased enough knife-twisting comedy to last a lifetime. If “The Office” had to continue — and in a bottom-line sense, it absolutely did — it would have seemed desperate and pathetic if the producers had replaced Michael with a Michael-esque character. Thankfully, they didn’t.

If I had to pick one word to describe the tone of the branch in the months following Michael’s exit, it would be “relieved.” Everybody just seems more relaxed now, and that’s realistic. We’ve all been in workplace situations where one person — a co-worker, or worse, a supervisor — kept us on edge day in and day out, to the point where we forgot what it felt like to not be miserable; when that person left or ceased being a threat, it was as if a great weight had been lifted. Michael’s former employees seem more centered now that he’s gone. That necessarily eliminates an easy source of excitement, but it also challenges the show to find humor in new places, and gives it a different energy: warmer and more reflective.

The branch’s new manager, Andy, is like Michael Scott minus a lot of Michael’s destructive jackass qualities. When Andy flails about in his new job, saying or doing ludicrous or ineffectual things, there’s never a sense that he’s willfully inflicting himself on everyone else as part of a passive-aggressive power trip. (He tried to wriggle out of a bet he made with his employees by phoning the author of a favorite management book for advice on how to get out of “one of those classic ass-tattoo incentive situations.”) Everybody knows that Andy means well. They roll their eyes at him, but you never get the sense that they’re secretly picturing him being devoured by piranha, which was often the case with Michael. Andy even has the potential to deliver on California’s faith in him, a prospect that at first seemed unlikely but is being validated a bit more with each passing week.

The high point of the season to date was “Lotto,” the episode in which the warehouse guys won $950,000 in the lottery by playing Daryl’s birthday. Daryl, who used to work in the warehouse, became depressed and dared Andy to fire him. The plot challenged both Craig Robinson and Ed Helms to explore previously unseen sides of their characters, and they responded with their subtlest, deepest acting to date. Robinson’s depiction of Daryl’s existential crisis was more alarming than funny; it was a dramatic turn, really — a sketch of a man suffering an instantaneous midlife crisis, cratering before our eyes. Andy halted Daryl’s doom spiral with a brilliantly written (by Charlie Grandy) recitation of all the ways in which Daryl had failed to deliver on the promise that prompted the parent company’s previous CEO, Jo (Kathy Bates), to take him out of the warehouse and put him in management. It was a tough love speech, unflattering but honest and caring. It could only have come from a boss who pays closer attention to his employees than they realize.

One of the more curious tics of the new “Office” is the tendency to have Robert California end episodes with a ruminating free-form monologue about human nature. Sometimes they’re freestanding and delivered in-the-moment — see California’s brilliant “horror story” from the Halloween episode — but they’re more often intercut with images of the staff. The result often has the feel of a home movie, or maybe a wildlife documentary. “Fear plays an interesting role in our lives,” California said in the closing section of the Halloween episode, over shots of the staff in their holiday garb. “How dare we let it motivate us. How dare we let it into our decision-making, into our livelihoods, into our relationships. It’s funny, isn’t it? We take a day a year to dress up in costumes and celebrate fear.”

These monologues take the place of the songs that often ended episodes in the Michael years. California is the all-seeing, all-knowing narrator who puts things in perspective. The device could seem cutesy or reductive, but it usually doesn’t. Why? Maybe it’s because it’s Spader doing the talking. A lifetime of moviegoing has conditioned us to assume that anything a Spader character says, however kooky, is intelligent and deserves a fair hearing. Spader’s birdlike body language, deep tenor voice, and Gatsby-like demeanor dry out any incipient moistness. California just seems like a more evolved person than anyone else on the show, so it’s only natural that we’d be receptive to whatever wisdom he wants to impart. “He creeps me out,” Jim said in the search committee episode, “but I think he’s a genius.”

The beautiful thing about that ‘interview’ scene in the finale was how it offered an electrifying alternative to the type of boss represented by Michael Scott, and almost everyone angling to replace him. California wasn’t a fatuous twit like Michael. He was more like a decadent prince forced to live among the rabble. The office workers had to be on their toes, alert at every second and scrutinizing everything the man across from them was saying, because they could sense that he was brilliant and manipulative — possibly so brilliant that they couldn’t tell precisely how he was manipulating them.

In the show’s season premiere, titled “The List,” Spader’s California was every inch the prince, dividing and conquering the employees of Dunder-Mifflin’s Scranton branch by “accidentally” leaving his notebook at the reception desk, with a two-column list of employee names in plain view. I put scare quotes around “accidentally” because California is obviously a mind-effer extraordinaire — a prospective branch manager who mysteriously replaced Jo (“Harry’s Law” star Kathy Bates) as the company’s CEO within days of starting work. (“He talked her out of her own job,” John Krasinski’s Jim Halpert said, “and I really don’t know how someone does that.”) California’s list was quickly copied and distributed throughout the branch. It unnerved the workers, who didn’t know if the presence of their names in one column or the other was a predictor of good fortune or doom; soon they were fighting like passengers on a crippled ocean liner trying to pile into the last remaining lifeboat. California compounded their fear by inviting all the people in one column out to lunch and proclaiming them “Winners,” which of course made the other people on the list “Losers.”

This was all very sharp and funny, and induced a stomach-tightening dread that hasn’t been evoked by “The Office” in a while. The series has been uniquely positioned to comment on America’s widening income gap, its citizens’ pervasive fear of being downsized for reasons beyond their control, and the selfishness that takes over when people fear that what little they have is about to be taken away. But for the most part it has avoided striking at the heart of those fears to produce squirm-inducing satire, instead insisting that everyone is basically decent, and that light at the end of the tunnel isn’t an onrushing freight train.

The instant panic over California’s notebook was a welcome departure from the warm/fuzzy approach that dominated the show near the end of Carell’s tenure. When the Dunder-Mifflin employees were rioting in their own workspace, “The List” left the series’ usual M.O. behind and hearkened back to its often squirm-inducing first and second season — and to the original, British version of “The Office,” whose sense of humor was usually much darker than anything the U.S. remake dared to attempt. (The eruption of violence was predicted in the scene where Dwight consulted his own notebook of hypothetical scenarios involving co-workers, one of which posited “who would eat whom in an ‘Alive’-type situation.”)

Will “The Office” be able to sustain that feeling of existential panic? Does it even want to? Predictions: No and no.

By the end of the episode, writer-director B.J. Novak was already dropping hints that although California was introduced as an arbitrary, vaguely sadistic power-tripper, he was probably going to turn out to be as sweet-souled as Michael (albeit infinitely smarter and more mature). In his climactic explication of the list, California said the “Winners” and “Losers” labels were temporary, and based on initial reactions that could be revised. (“Winners, prove me right. Losers, prove me wrong.”) I liked that; you can read it as evidence that California is a fair person or that he’s merely setting up the first stage of an epic white-collar battle royale, one that will split the office into paranoid, feuding factions. 

But I was disappointed in the scene where the official new office manager, Andy (Ed Helms), confronted his new CEO and listed reasons why everyone on the “Losers” list was really a winner. It’s thrilling when a comedy that systematically blunted any sharp edges it once possessed starts drawing blood again. Why put the knives away so soon and start hugging? Andy’s standing-up-to-the-man scene felt like a failure of creative nerve; so did California’s non-reaction to being politely but publicly told that he was full of it, at the start of his tenure as CEO of the company that pays Andy’s salary. The final twist — Andy winning an “extra” half-day of vacation that was already on the schedule — was nice, but it didn’t redeem the softness of the scene that preceded it. California’s admission that his early reactions were subject to change felt like a not-too-coded plea for audiences not to pre-judge the future run of “The Office” based on this one episode. But when a long-running series seems like it’s on the verge of of shaking up its formula, then reverts to type, you can’t blame a viewer for feeling pessimistic.

Dig deep into your wallets, folks! This man’s story needs to be told!

3. George Lopez “jokes” about being canceled (clip starts at 1:30 mark):

Ha … ha? Racism!

Actually, I’m starting to realize why his show got canned. But I’ll watch his final show tonight out of respect, anyway.

4. James Spader will rule “The Office”:

And he’ll be the new star of the show, as this promo suggests. 

Unfortunately, the clip actually tells us nothing about the character we haven’t already seen, but hey, I could watch it 100 times and it will still be better than half of last season.

5. Safe-for-work “Star Wars” porn parody:

This looks amazing. Why is it funny? I thought “parody” was just another word for “We’re making this beloved show or movie into a porno.”

How they ever found a kid who looks that much like Mark Hamill is beyond me. Two tickets, please!

However apt the “Office” comparisons might be, I can’t help thinking “The Ministry” may have more in common with Armando Iannucci’s brilliant British show “The Thick of It” — adapted into the popular 2009 movie “In the Loop” — which traces British politicians and civil servants through the ins and outs of their (mostly petty) personal and political crises. Here’s the trailer for the third season of that show, for comparison’s sake [warning: explicit language]:

[Washington Post, TheBrowser]