Just about everybody knows “The Office.” It’s a classic show, a fan favorite. It’s the kind of thing I put on after a long day because I just need a laugh and it’s something familiar that’s comforting in a certain way. So when I started reading “Conference Room, Five Minutes” by Shea Serrano, which is a written digital work composed of ten essays about “The Office,” I thought I would enjoy reading about a show that I really liked. However, after the first few essays, I began to realize that reading all ten essays was going to be a chore instead of the enjoyable experience that I anticipated.
The essays were composed of many different elements: from simply analyzing a specific scene of “The Office” to taking the characters completely out of their normal scenarios and putting them into different categories based on who they were in the show. Most of the essay titles seemed to be from the different episodes of “The Office” but usually the title would be the only thing that matched the show and the rest of the essay would go in a totally different direction.
As I continued to read more and more, I became increasingly annoyed and confused with several things, including the author’s writing style and tone. It was supposed to be humorous, I’m assuming, however, I thought that after the first few essays, it became excessive and over done. It was hard to even understand what was being said at times because of the way that it was being written, and while maybe it was supposed to be funny, it just ended up being polluted and hard to read.
One thing that largely added to this was the author’s excessive use of footnotes. I’m unsure what the author’s seeming obsession with them was but they were grossly overused in these essays, usually adding almost paragraph-long additions to the already dense writing. If you need three sentence-long footnotes to elaborate on what you’re writing then you’re not explaining it well enough in the actual writing. If it was meant to be humorous and a quirky addition to the text, then I found myself increasingly aggravated with having to read a footnote every two sentences to even be able to understand what was being said.
I have watched most of “The Office” several times and I would consider myself a pretty adamant fan. However, when reading these, I got lost in what the actual point was in all the details and seemingly unnecessary scenarios that were being explained and elaborated on. The author ranks the basketball players from a well known episode with a seemingly arbitrary criteria that he also applies to the essay about the office’s best couple. In reading this, it was interesting how he applied the categories in narrowing down a perfect couple but I was very confused about how the categories themselves were created and why it was those ones and not others that were chosen because they felt so random and all over the place. This confusion was widespread through all the essays.
The author of this work is Shea Serrano, who has written several other books and articles that have been quite popular such as “Basketball (and Other Things)”. I don’t necessarily want to consider him lacking as a writer and so I must think that perhaps our humor is very different from one another. However, if these essays are supposed to be a project for the show he loved, I feel that they could have been written in a more accessible way for all fans of “The Office” to enjoy and not have so unbalanced a focus on random details and made up scenarios about the show.
I am unsure if I would actually recommend this work to anyone, even a fan of the show, because of the large chance that they won’t like, or even be able to tolerate, his particular and very apparent writing style and humor. I feel that even if I was a raging “Office” fan, I don’t know if I could look past all this to be able to even begin enjoying these essays.
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