Cast members may change, quite frequently in fact, but on The Office one thing will always be consistent, the tone.
Post-“Goodbye, Michael”, it was a bit of a shock heading into a new episode of The Office that for all intents and purposes forgot that he had ever even been on the show. In some ways, the dynamic was refreshing. There was no moping, no reminiscing.
The Dunder Mifflin employees kept calm and carried on.
Along with the required amnesia came the dawn of a new era of weird antics and suddenly we were thrown right back into the fray with an anticipated conflict, in this case the “inner circle”.
The idea of office favoritism has existed for a few seasons now, looking back even at the various episodes devoted to Dundies distribution and Michael’s preference for certain characters (Jim, Dwight, Ryan, etc.) over others (namely, Toby). But this is an all new level of preferential treatment, with private (though not so private since the walls to Deangelo’s office are actually windows and the meeting reminders are sent over text message) meetings between a select group of office employees.
As a result, I agreed with the female employees’ complaints of representation of certain groups over others. Though the choice of no girls in the inner circle could probably be chalked up to the fact that most of the meetings within the inner circle consisted of playing mini-basketball and “chewing the fat”, as one might say.
After this episode, it was hard to really formulate an opinion on Deangelo. On one hand, he is pretty ridiculous, even beyond Michael Scott who made endearing mistakes. Deangelo’s showy sense of humor is much less charming than his predecessor’s. Particularly in the case of his fake juggling routine. Using Phyllis’s face as a prop? Not cool, just weird. Okay, kind of funny. But still pretty weird.
On the other hand, Deangelo is a sympathetic character. After “Michael’s Last Dundies” you couldn’t help but feel sorry for him and his unconquerable stage fright. And following “The Inner Circle”, his (and this is a spoiler, mind you) speech impediment conjured up flashbacks to my own personal experiences with someone who thought they were communicating, but were actually just speaking gibberish, following a brain injury. It was a terrible personal memory, and a sad occurrence on the show that, despite his mistakes, made Deangelo more relatable.
These mixed emotions came together to form some indecision on what to make of the episode as well as the past few featuring the new boss.
But, at this point, The Office is still in a point of transition. Will Ferrell is most certainly not continuing in the role of Deangelo, with the fate of the character at the end of “The Inner Circle” being a reasonable confirmation for this hypothesis.
As was advertised previously, there are several different comedians from other hit sitcoms vying for the role of Regional Manager. From Ray Romano of Everybody Loves Raymond fame to Will Arnett, known for his role as G.O.B. on Arrested Development, there’s quite the long list of awesome possibilities to work with.
So even with Ferrell making a pitiable exit after only a couple of episodes, The Office, like its employees, will keep calm and carry on to even better things.