The Office is Deteriorating

My wife and I enjoy the show The Office. Both of us studied English in college and my senior colloqium course was on American humorists. In my opinion, The Office is one of the great examples of American humor. The Office is actually based on a British sitcom of the same name, but this is a thoroughly Americanized version with its own characters and plot lines.

The show constantly riffs on the tensions, diversions and political correctness of the modern workplace.

We actually are not television watchers, so we usually rent it on DVD or more recently we watch it on Hulu (which I highly recommend for watching TV) We missed a good portion of the season 5 episodes, and I haven't taken the time to see if they are available on rental yet. I don't need to own them.

We watched episodes 2-4 last Friday night of Season 6, and I think the humor has become even more unnecessarily sexualized (it has always had a lot of wink, wink humor in it and a fair dose of sexual situations and relationships), but for the most part, it is done in at a PG - PG-13 level

Anyway, I still enjoy the show, but with more reservations than before, and I'm disappointed that it went up a notch in that type of content.

The Office has an entire swag culture surrounding it with all kinds of t-shirt websites and single piece imprinters like Cafe Press purveying apparel and aprons and stuff riffing on the jokes and one liners and the company name Dunder Mifflin. Naturally, NBC has its own promotional items and kitsch shop with promotional items based on The Office