And if Pam’s mom’s the same one she was trying to safeguard from her co-workers, and the same one that Pam called her best friend, and called after Jim kisser her for the first time. They’ll hopefully segue her character on the former circumstance better than they did on the latter; (when she told Pam it wasn’t too late to back out). Yeah, she got a divorce, can that really be enough to blind her to how obnoxiously perfect these two are for each other?
Pam broke up her first marriage to basically be with the guy, what kind of thing’s that to say from her best friend. I got the impression Pam’s mom was more like the ‘cool aunt’ type to Pam. (detatched as “mom”, when came to how much they shared with eachother… you know what I mean).
It was an accident that he e-mailed it to Daryl, he intended to e-mail it to Packer.
So instead of sending it to his horndog friend, he sent it to the warehouse. I am not sure why you think it was measurably better that he would have sent it to Packer.
Not always. Only since about partway through season 4.
In the early seasons of the show, it was repeatedly made clear that Michael had always been Michael - for the best example of this, see the “Fundle Bundle” debacle. His stellar performance as a salesman had nothing to do with any former Jim-like qualities, but rather that the same attributes that make him insufferable as a boss actually worked pretty well on sales calls.
Jim was originally the antithesis of Michael - a chill, slackerish guy who wasn’t a terribly good salesman, but who did have a good level of social awareness. That’s why he was such a great straight man in the early seasons of the show (yes, there was a time when Jim’s mugging for the camera came off as a cute commiseration/ wink at the audience rather than an annoying tic). Unlike Michael, Jim had a normal person’s understanding of, say, when a joke crosses the line from funny to offensive.
The whole “Jim is turning into Michael” thing is a clumsy plot device that was made up fairly recently, and which shits all over established character and continuity from the early seasons of the show.
Pam can get through the day at the office with Michael, but nearly every social occasion with him outside the office has been unbearable - remember when P&J went to dinner at Michael & Jan’s? Pam was able to manage a business relationship with Michael when he started his own company, but on a personal level, Michael is completely nuts. He has ruined virtually every social event he is a part of. When a person leaves work, they leave that environment behind and go back to their own world. Pam’s world outside the office consists of her husband, her baby-to-be, and her family. Michael being with her mother will impinge on almost every aspect of her personal life, particularly with her relationship with her mom vis a vis the new baby. Now that Michael has insuinuated himself into her home world, she has no chance of ever getting away from him to recharge. He knew before he began dating Pam’s mom how it would affect Pam (hence, not telling her) and he went ahead with it because he was horny. Any relationship that developed came after that fact. Sure, Pam had a really strong reaction. It’s a comedy. How would Angela have reacted if Michael had a relationship with her own mom? Probably just the same. With Pam’s hormones added to the mix, I’m surprised she didn’t kill him. At the end, she admitted that maybe she could see that she had a reaction out of proportion to what had occurred, but that she still had those feelings. This episode was as realistic a portrayal as I have seen on this show, and the first time Pam has ever told Michael what an ass he has been. It’s been years overdue. Go, Pam!
I’ve never understood where people get “Jim turning into Michael”. He’s had some bad ideas (or good ideas poorly executed) but he’s a far cry from Michael. He can be inexperienced and somewhat of a bumbler, but comparing him to Michael is like – I don’t know, pick any pair of opposites. The only thing I see they have in common is that both want to be liked too much to be good managers. There’s no hope that Michael will change but Jim will learn from his mistakes.
In fact, after rewatching this episode, I have to say that Michael dating his employee’s mother really puts Pam in an position that an employer shouldn’t place an employee in, especially when he scolds her for the way she was treating her mother. He crossed a boundary bordering on employee harassment. Poor Pam!
The joke is that Jim, as the Only Sane Man, will attempt to apply sane, rational and logical management techniques. The more he does it, the more the staff will revolt and twist his ideas into something bizarre. He will then find himself reverting to “Michael Scott” management techniques until everything returns to the status quo - mumbling non-sequitors under his breath to distract people, hiding in his office or otherwise avoiding people, and so on.
Except that doesn’t make sense. Why would the Only Sane Man have to resort, specifically, to Michael Scott’s techniques when logical and rationality don’t work? Why not become an overbearing control freak? Or stop caring at all? Or, if he’s really trying to make a place for himself in this new position, do what any semi-intelligent person (i.e. Jim’s character from seasons 1-3) would do, and take some night classes on management to learn how to do it effectively.
It makes no sense that, out of all of the myriad management approaches possible, Jim would instinctively go with the one that he himself knows is an utter failure of leadership. Except, of course, that it makes for ham-handed, slightly amusing (but out of character) wacky sitcom antics.
It’s a symptom of the show writers’ escalating laziness (or incompetence) that they couldn’t think of a clever way to make Jim’s promotion funny, while not turning the character into a drooling idiot. They used to be so good at this, too.
Oh, I totally understand her wanting to scream and throw a fit. Goodness knows my family members have dated some real prizes over the years, sometimes even getting engaged to or marrying them. Frankly, some of them make Michael Scott look pretty damn good. He’s a clueless dork who frequently says stupid, selfish, thoughtless things, but he bathes regularly and holds a job and keeps it in his pants around other women and doesn’t actively try to stir up discord and strife at Christmas dinner.
But part of being a grown-up (or even a reasonably well-raised child over the age of 6 or so) is learning to sit down and shut up and be pleasant to the people your family members care about. If I could manage to be civil to the stuck-up bitch who was fucking around on my brother with anything that would move and destroying his credit while he raised her kids from another marriage when I was a teenager, a grown-ass woman who thinks she’s mature enough to get married and have a baby ought to be able to not throw a screaming hissy fit in the middle of her place of business over Michael Scott. Like I said before, she’s really lucky that her management teams is Michael and her husband or her ass would be in a sling.
Well, what management decisions have we seen Jim make so far? There was the birthday cake debacle, and the mess with the COL raises, and that’s all I’m coming up with right now. With the cake, once the one-cake-a-month idea went over like a lead balloon, what other choice was there to make? His choices were the Michael Scott method, or doing away with the cakes entirely, and if he’d gone with the latter there would have been an armed uprising. In that case, going with Michael’s precedent was the logical and rational thing to do. With the raises, Michael’s first instinct was quite obviously the one that was going to have the smallest effect on staff morale. Jim’s idea, while logical and rational, was guaranteed to piss people off.
And that rather fits in with the Only Sane Man thing–logic and rationality only work if you’re dealing with logical and rational people. The staff at D-M Scranton is, quite frankly, not a logical and rational bunch. There’s typically a method to a lot of the madness, as we saw in the ep with the sales calls, but it’s still madness. That’s why Michael can’t keep any of the people from other branches who transfer in, and things go to shit when someone like Charles takes over the place, but when you leave Michael alone with that bunch, they’re the top-grossing branch in the company.
You guys are ruining this episode for me. This was by far my favorite episode. Just great. And then people start …
Look.
Michael has repeatedly been a jerk. As in knowing he is going to hurt someone and then following thru on a plan to do it. Toby in particular has been the target of many such schemes.
But, whether he knows what he is doing or not when he hurts people doesn’t matter. He does it so often and so thoroughly that no one in their right mind would want to have a relative dating him.
While “officially” a worker is not supposed to lose it at work, Real Life happens. And given all the other crap that other people have done at The Office, Pam’s reaction is quite tame.
It think the transition in Jim’s character been a bit smoother than that, however I don’t think Jim will ever *fully become *Michael. He seems a lot more serious these days, and I don’t think he’s immune to making a bad decision. I think it’s a fun contrast to younger Jim, like karma biting his smug ass.
I don’t think Michael was ever like Jim, aside from maybe a few traits.
Jim will never fully become Michael because he has a few things Michael never has (and probably never will). He’s got a wife, he’s got a baby on the way, and he’s got friends. A lot of Michael’s insanity stems from his attempt to make the office his family, and treat them as such. They all resist this to varying degrees because, well, who wouldn’t resist that? Michael is a desperately lonely, socially awkward, rude, sometimes manipulative and even cruel, misfit. Which is the reason for most of the things he does. Jim isn’t, and barring something tragic and bizarre, he’ll probably remain a fairly well adjusted person trying to keep the crazies he works with on something of an even keel.
Jim is not going to become Michael, he has too much comon sense for that. But I also think we are finding that Jim is not necessarily a bright guy when it comes to management. So it is somewhat natural for him to fall back on certain things he has seen over the years from Michael.
Has Jim ever demonstrated any qualities of “leadership”? Ironically the shitty reviews he received during Ryan’s and then Charles’ reign more or less accurately describe his behavior. He spends most of his time flirting with Pam and playing pranks on Dwight. IIRC, he isn’t even the top salesman in terms of numbers. He views the other employees in the office with disdain and his superiors as imbeciles. It’s actually hard to figure out why he got promoted other than he had tenure and every other possible candidate is so much worse.
Also, he still has to deal with Michael as his co-manager. So we don’t really know what would happen if it was just Jim in charge.
I’m not denying that Jim isn’t exactly suited to the manager job. What bugs me is the writers’ attempt to turn him into Michael, as if just putting Jim into a position of leadership will inevitably lead to Michael 2.0. Like I mentioned above, there are plenty of flawed managerial styles that Jim could have had (angry boss, apathetic boss, power tripping boss, etc), many of which fit his established characterization better than “lonely and childish boss who wants everyone to love him.” Jim isn’t lonely - he has a wife and lots of friends. He isn’t childish - which isn’t to say that he’s mature (his immaturity is more that of a 20-year old hipster rather than that of a screaming toddler). And he doesn’t really give a damn what other people in the office think about him, besides Pam.
IOW, I agree that Dunder Mifflin promoted Jim without much reason. That part of the story makes sense, and is consistent with DM’s demonstrated broken communication between Corporate and the branch offices. It also makes sense that Jim would, at least initially, turn out to be a crappy boss. What doesn’t make sense is Jim instantly losing most of his IQ points and social skills, and turning into Michael Scott.
I have to disagree to a certain extent about how “Jim turning into Michael” is such an unbelievable thing. Jim has always been a minimal effort kind of guy. It is totally within character for him to do as little as possible to get by. He has already seen, with the birthday and staff raise incidents, that doing things differently than Michael causes a massive uproar that would take a lot more effort to deal with than he is willing to put in.
Even if it is only subconsciously, Jim sees that, with this group of loonies, the Michael Scott Method of Management (patent pending) is the path of least resistance, which is Jim’s way of doing things.