An open letter to The Office:

I'm not going back. Seriously, I'm not.

You dragged out the whole romance thing between Jim and Pam for three seasons and I went along with it. Because it's funny and clever and, I'll confess, I got caught up hoping they would get together. And now that they have you want to futz with it and cause some conflict to shake things up. I can understand that, I really can. The formula is as old as drama itself - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. Every show with this kind of situation does it eventually.

But you know what makes it different? It's that the characters are really meant to be together. This isn't two people just thrown together, or opposites attracting, or two people drawn together for no discernable reason whatsoever. This is two people who have a lot in common, really like each other, and should be together.

If it sounds like I'm just getting all sentimental, I'm not. It's not about some desire to see fictional characters find happiness. It's about maintaining a sense of dramatic integrity. There's no believable reason why they should have a conflict right now. Based on the season finale and the ads leading up to the season premiere Thursday it looks like there is to be some conflict over the fact that Jim failed to propose. But that's an absurd premise and emotionally dishonest to boot.

So go, go send Pam to wherever that art school thing was. Get your Lily subplot done, let Pam find some independence and some alluring artist guy so she can wonder if "Jim's really serious" - or some other BS, nonsense premise. Just have her back and them back together within three episodes.

But I'm not putting up with the drama. It's a comedy, for crying out loud. Enough with the drama, enough with the bizarre, uncomfortable episodes of last season. Make with the funny or I'm moving on. Got too much competition for that time slot on our DVR as it is.

For those of you no longer watching The Simpsons (and in many ways, I admire your ability to let go as I can't yet) you may not have seen some of the bizarre turns it's taken lately.  Here are some screencaps from The Bart-Mangled Banner, aired May, 2004.  It was on syndication yesterday and that reminded me I meant to this a while back.

Honestly, the episode is just a great big mess.  (Great meaning large or immense; I use it in the pejorative sense)

The backstory is that through a series of misadventures, Bart accidently mooned the U.S. flag.  To defend that, he goes on a bizarre simulacrum of The O'Reilly Factor.  This is handled with the same broad strokes as they used in earlier episodes with their Rush Limbaugh clone, Birch Barlow.


After the TV appearance goes sour, this being Bush's America and all, they're imprisoned in what turns out to be Alcatraz:

With them is that constantly-persecuted, stifled champion of freedom: Michael Moore...




and the censored Dixie Chicks who have suffered so.




The family is taken to, naturally:




...where they are forced to watch a video on...




how the Bill of Rights sucks.



This is, of course, supposed to be the conservative viewpoint of the Bill of Rights: that we don't like it.

This differs from the LIBERAL viewpoint on the Bill of Rights which is:

• Expand the 1st Amendment so that we can show hardcore sex on broadcast networks during the day
• Expand the 4th Amendment to allow infanticide
• And to make room for those changes go ahead and remove the 2nd, 9th, and 10th Amendments.  They're really outdated anyway...

But, you know, whatever... After a while you just stop caring.  This actually pales to the 18th season finale (May 20) which shows it as extremist to be upset about profanity on broadcast networks.  Invoking, you guessed it, the First Amendment.  Then it goes on about how stupid and wrong Fox News, etc.

That and the Family Guy episode the same week that was set in Texas and, well, you can imagine, I'm sure.

I don't even care if they have a liberal bias, so long as it's funny and they occasionally jab the other side too.  The Simpsons used to do that; but now it's just become nonsensical ravings.

The DVR I'm currently using in my office has the annoying habit of staying on whatever channel I last manually selected, rather than the last channel it happened to use.  I'm not sure why I had it on Cartoon Network at some point but at least it's better than when it was stuck on PBS all the time.

Anyway, I had it on (muted, of course) while I was working and saw this scene come up.  Apparently some direct-to-video Scooby Doo movie called Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase.  Yep, seriously.  The plot concerns the threadbare premise of being stuck in a video game.  The twist being it's a video game about their old adventures - unmasking unscrupulous land coveters and so forth.  I was able to ignore it until this scene:

Here's our heroes with their new outfits and eyes (a big improvement if I may be allowed an opinion) running into a diner.  What were they running from?  A computer virus, of course.  But wait, who's that behind them at the counter?

Hmmmm...




Yep, in a scene straight from Freud's deepest nightmare that didn't involve his mother, they've run into the game's heroes - themselves.  Though since the game's creator hasn't seen them recently he has apparently created them in the older style: ascots, tights, and creepy eyes included.




This, apparently, is Shaggy's ultimate test of reality.  Take THAT, Descartes!




Sizing each other up.  This was followed by some snarky comments about the other's fashion sense.  Of course since the older Daphne's eyes are apparently just dots on her skin, her opinion can be easily discounted.




Fred misses his old ascot.  And that's all that's going on in this picture.  Don't get any ideas.  Fred was all about the ladies.