This is a weird show, and it's actually easy to not like it.
It took me a really long time, and multiple viewings - almost out of sheer curiosity - for this show to start finally growing on me enough for me to starting to eventually like it.
It's the kind of experience that you have to be 'in tune' to, understand the characters, observe all the sometimes really subtle humor, find something that speaks to you, to start liking it. It's not immediately genius, it's more like 'after not understanding' for the longest time, you expect it to be crappy, and you watch it anyway, and then something might click a little bit.
Then something else makes you somewhat laugh or smile, and after repeat viewings sort of start 'making sense' in its own, perhaps silly way. When you can start to expect a certain 'tone' or 'style' from the show, you can start appreciating the humor and the misunderstandings and Michael's innocent charm more and more.
It's possible you might never like it and always hate it, but for me, a change happened after I just watched it enough. I didn't expect it, but the things Michael says, and how he delivers them, just started really getting me to like the show more each time.
One very small example;
Michael asks Ryan, who used to be a temp, and is now .. a salesman or something, to fetch him coffee. Ryan says, "I don't do that stuff anymore", obviously referring to 'fetching coffee' and other temp duties that a salesman doesn't have to do.
Michael insults Ryan by saying "No, it's for me, bimbo!"
It's subtle, but there are layers in that joke. It undermines Ryan's importance, it plays on Michael's view of Ryan as a temp he remembers him as (not letting him have the dignity of 'not being a temp'), him not even taking into account Ryan's elevated status as a salesman (or whatnot), and making Ryan seem so stupid, he thinks Michael orders Ryan to get coffee for himself, and fully expects Ryan to fetch him coffee, now that he cleared it up.
reply
share
avortac4 (3676)
4 years ago
If you think and experience these jokes fully and understand all the layers, and where it all comes from and why, and you get the character motivations and experience the relationship dynamics properly, there's a lot of really fun stuff in there to enjoy.
But these things are _so_ easy to not notice, or dismiss, or just see from a superficial perspective, that if you just see this as 'non-funny dialogue' without realizing all the perspectives that work in tandem, you won't get it, and understandably probably continue to hate it.
So a lot of responsibility for enjoyment of this show falls to the observant diligence of the viewer - if you focus wrong, you'll miss it. If you don't understand what's going on and why, you'll miss it.
It's like hearing a joke, but focusing only on the words used, without listening to the content of it, and then dismissing the joke as unfunny.
This is the kind of superficial TV viewing that can EASILY happen with this show, because there's a surprising amount of intricate subtlety woven into many of the scenes that you can't appreciate with a surface-level viewing.
This is exactly why it took me so many viewings to start appreciating the show - I simply didn't understand or realize what was going on, I didn't give the show enough credit, and I wasn't immersed in the relationship dynamic that makes the dialogue so funny - in a very subtle way. So all I heard and saw was 'words that make unfunny sentences, spoken by some people I don't know'.
Once you know change that into 'Michael does his typical misunderstanding thing while undermining the egotistical Ryan in a brilliant way', you can see how there's way more substance than what I originally experienced.
Once you start seeing everything in this show in its proper context and the underlying intricacies open up to you, THAT is when you can properly and truly start enjoying the show.
It's not for everyone, maybe you'll still hate it - but it needs more than surface viewing.
reply
share