Sun, November 12, 2006
Super-Sized Office—3:06 PM
Next week, NBC Thursday is continuing its sweeps tradition of "super-sizing" its key comedies into 40-minute episodes.
The Office kicked things off early, by offering an extended "Producers' Cut" of last week's episode ("Branch Closing") on the show's website, with 7 minutes of new footage including two additional story lines plus other accents and details.
I'm against the repeated special-editioning of movies because it creates multiple separate realities for the story (and also leaves a witless DVD collector wondering which version to own – what's more canonical, the first version or the latest?). Even more so in the case of an ongoing TV show, where developing story lines may be affected by the extra scenes. Creed's and Meredith's stories are unlikely to change the course of the show, but what of the moments between Pam and Roy? Did those happen, or have they been stricken from the record since they didn't air on NBC? For example, the unaired scene about Dwight and Angela's pregnancy from last season: we assume that didn't happen since it didn't air. So, will the show televise new scenes covering this sort of Pam/Roy interaction, and if they don't are we to assume they didn't happen? It's sort of confusing, kind of a shame.
Nevertheless, I recommend viewing the extended episode online, because it's really funny. It's impressive that the show's creators come up with so much good stuff each week that the episodes run long – I'm just not sure how I feel about the trimmed moments being released to the public, as entertaining as they are.
