Spring Break
'Office' provides financial education
by Daniel D. Snyder
Associate Editor
Arts | 4/7/09
Posted online at 11:38 PM EST on 4/6/09
/ Last updated at 4:23 AM EST on 4/6/09
It's been a few years since I've owned a TV. After my first year of college, I stowed it away and haven't really bothered setting it up since. And why should I? Most of my favorite shows have been available via bootleg over the Internet for years and newer sites like hulu.com are only making it easier to watch what you want at your leisure with minimal commercial interference. Whenever I do get to flip around on one of those old boxes, I'm reminded why I don't miss them at all: They fill me with a feeling of indescribable hatred.
About 90 percent of this feeling can be ascribed to reality television, which seems to dominate my occasional bouts of channel-surfing. I hate this plague on American culture for many reasons, but if I had to pick one, it would be the genre's failure to depict anything close to reality itself. The worst of these offenders have been shows like The Hills and The City (both spin-offs of the equally carcinogenic Laguna Beach), wherein we follow the lives of brain-dead socialites while they try to make it in the real world.
These shows take place in Los Angeles and New York City, respectively, two of the most competitive and rigorous cities on the planet, and yet the socialites' meticulously designed lives are utterly devoid of serious obstacles. Their time is spent buying anything that glitters and shouting really vapid stuff at each other in dimly lit clubs and restaurants. They've essentially boiled down the difficulties of modern urban living to a lecture on social etiquette. Even more callously, they have completely ignored the reality of life in today's work environment, which is, as we all know, bleak. Something I would watch: an episode on how not to buy a $500 purse the size of my fist and the subtle art of eating lunch out of a dumpster.
So, leave it to a lowly sitcom, The Office, to educate our nation's youth about financial reality and the modern job market. It's an odd rule, but parody often holds more truth than earnest attempts at the depiction of reality. In this respect, The Office is to reality television as The Daily Show is to cable network news.
About 90 percent of this feeling can be ascribed to reality television, which seems to dominate my occasional bouts of channel-surfing. I hate this plague on American culture for many reasons, but if I had to pick one, it would be the genre's failure to depict anything close to reality itself. The worst of these offenders have been shows like The Hills and The City (both spin-offs of the equally carcinogenic Laguna Beach), wherein we follow the lives of brain-dead socialites while they try to make it in the real world.
These shows take place in Los Angeles and New York City, respectively, two of the most competitive and rigorous cities on the planet, and yet the socialites' meticulously designed lives are utterly devoid of serious obstacles. Their time is spent buying anything that glitters and shouting really vapid stuff at each other in dimly lit clubs and restaurants. They've essentially boiled down the difficulties of modern urban living to a lecture on social etiquette. Even more callously, they have completely ignored the reality of life in today's work environment, which is, as we all know, bleak. Something I would watch: an episode on how not to buy a $500 purse the size of my fist and the subtle art of eating lunch out of a dumpster.
So, leave it to a lowly sitcom, The Office, to educate our nation's youth about financial reality and the modern job market. It's an odd rule, but parody often holds more truth than earnest attempts at the depiction of reality. In this respect, The Office is to reality television as The Daily Show is to cable network news.
Viewing Comments 1 - 1 of 1
dpgr
posted 4/20/09 @ 11:00 AM EST
This episode was better than the last one. I was starting to worry after the last two episodes that the show was going downhill.
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