Tying The Office and Grey's Anatomy Together

One of the things that both The Office and Grey's Anatomy are very good at doing is setting up a comical moment and then injecting serious character insight at the end, so that entertainment and character development are blended together into one nice scene.

Take for example this past week's episode on Grey's Anatomy, where Cristina (Sandra Oh) gets suckered into a lunch date with her boyfriend Preston's (Isaiah Washington) mother. She freaks out, tells her ailing boyfriend that he needs to bail her out, then storms out. Later, she's at lunch with Preston's mother and things are not going well, when lo and behold Preston has gotten up out of his hospital bed and shows up to save Cristina. But instead of saving her, his mother starts ordering him around and normally-proud Preston can only stammer out an apology before walking away. The scene is a very nice comedic turn of events for Cristina, who had hoped to be saved by Preston but instead sees him get badgered around by his mother and leave with his tail between his legs. However, the next thing Preston's mother does is turn to Cristina and just lay into her, calling her selfish for dragging her hurt boyfriend out of bed just because she was uncomfortable having lunch with her. It's quite a poignant cut into Cristina's character, and goes to the heart of numerous problems that she has been having up to this point. She really is a very self-centered person, and the comment will probably begin the process of maturation for her.

The Office does something similar, albeit with a different feel to it. In the season opener, we learn that Pam (Jenna Fischer) has rejected Jim (John Krasinski), causing Jim to transfer to a different office so that he won't have to see Pam anymore. Meanwhile the main plot of the episode revolves around Dwight (Rainn Wilson) trying to accurately ascertain who may or may not be gay within the office, so eventually he tries to buy a "gaydar" online. Towards the end of the episode, Jim ships Dwight a "gaydar" that's really just a metal detector with lettering imprinted on it to make it look like it can detect homosexuals. Dwight excitedly uses it on Oscar (Oscar Nunez), the only known gay person in the office, and when Dwight moves it towards Oscar's belt, it goes off because of the metal in the belt buckle. Dwight is gleefully tricked into believing that the gaydar works. However, he then accidentally brushes the gaydar against his own belt, and then it goes off, and the confusion on his face is priceless as he thinks that he himself might be secretly gay. As with the scene in Grey's Anatomy, the humor lies in seeing how the follies of Dwight's character lead him to be duped. Pam sees all of this and giggles, but then she becomes crestfallen as she realizes that Jim was the reason why she was able to enjoy this moment of hilarity, and that he is no longer around to make her laugh. It cuts brilliantly into her character's inner desires, and how she is living with the consequences of her actions.

It's really this deft hand that the shows exhibit, being able to balance comedy with character development, that I think makes both of these shows so enjoyable for me. Without the character insight the shows would be soulless sitcoms, and the humor wouldn't be nearly as sharp. And without the humor, the shows would crush themselves under the weight of their character's troubles. But both shows blend the two so smoothly together, flowing one right into the other, that it really is a joy to watch both shows week in and week out.