What did The Office mean to you?

That's abusrd. Andy very frequently shows that he's more than a fool. The moment in the finale when he immediately supported April going to veterinarian school was beautiful. Don't mistake funny for stupid.

I disagreed with pretty much all of your post, though, so I suppose I am one of the people you're referring to. Of course, every major TV review and many fans of both shows agree with me.

 

Andy has a lot of great moments. He's one of my favorite characters on shows I currently watch. Kevin, Michael and Dwight have all also had a lot of great moments. They've all also had moments that are painfully, unfortunately exaggerated.

 

The Office hasn't had any season as bad as Parks and Recs first.

 

You're comparing a six-episode season to 24 very mediocre episodes last season for The Office. All of Parks' long seasons were very good (Season 4) to amazing (Season 3). Here's how I'd rank their seasons:

Among the greatest sitcom seasons ever:
1. Season 2, The Office
2. Season 3, Parks and Recreation

Exceptional:
3. Season 3, The Office
4. Season 5, Parks and Recreation

Very good:
5. Season 2, Parks and Recreation
6. Season 4, Parks and Recreation
7. Season 4, The Office
8. Season 1, The Office

Enjoyable:
9. Season 5, The Office
10. Season 7, The Office
11. Season 6, The Office

Mediocre:
12. Season 1, Parks and Recreation
13. Season 9, The Office

Tedious:
14. Season 8, The Office

 

Versatile is like the 93Devil of TV shows.

Maybe they can work together to come up with a system we can use to measure the quality of anything.

 

I'm a TV show?

The ability to prioritize based on preference would seem to be one of the advantages of the human mind. It's all opinion. Do you need me to clarify that in my posts, like jr/shotglass does?

 

You might have a point about the praise for Parks and Rec in that it's reaching about the point in the series that The Office really started to go down hill, so how Parks does the next few seasons will likely determine how they go down in history compared to each other. But...

I'd say Parks and Rec at its best is slightly better than The Office at its best. I find Ben and Leslie much more enjoyable than Jim and Pam, but to each his own.

They settled on the characterization of Andy after about six episodes (and I don't even think he was intended to be a full-time character at first, but Chris Pratt was too good). That's a lot different than what they did to Kevin more than halfway through the series run. Andy is pretty dumb and a huge goofball, but fairly believable as a man-child who never really had to grow up and bounces around different part-time jobs. The past few years Kevin has been portrayed as Forrest Gump somehow working as an accountant. The Office writers took a funny idea -- when Holly was tricked into thinking he was mentally retarded -- and went way, way too far with it.

Greg Daniels did an awesome job of turning Pawnee into a live-action Springfield, which allows for outlandish characters and craziness. The Office was kind of stuck in "the office" so it turned its regular characters into over-the-top jokes, which was amusing at times, but it also made you roll your eyes because we'd already spent a few years getting to know these characters as fairly normal people.

As for Parks and Rec's first season, if you go back and rewatch it the last couple of episodes were pretty decent, they started to get a feel for what the show was going to be fairly quickly. The 10th overall episode, Practice Date, was an all-time classic, so by midway through a typical season they were really clicking.

Sepinwall wrote a couple weeks ago that he could think of five sitcoms in the past few decades that were great from the pilot episode on. Many of the greatest sitcoms of all time needed a few episodes to get going, The Office and Parks and Recreation included.

 

Greg Daniels? Pretty sure Michael Schur deserves all the credit for any larger Pawnee universe. Daniels has about as much to do with P&R as JJ Abrams did with LOST. Beyond the pilot, not much.

 

Oh, I don't want to short change Schur. I just cited Daniels because he's involved and there are similarities to the Simpsons and I thought he was fairly active with the show the first few seasons. I agree Schur is the main man.

 

Parks and Recreation has 10 primary characters, and eight regularly have been able to carry a good episode. (And hell, "Jerry's Retirement" was great.)

The Office has 22 primary characters, but only four regularly have been able to carry a good episode. (I'm not counting Andy or Erin, even though the show runners don't realize they can't.)

That's the problem with the show. Seasons 2 and 3 are lastingly wonderful. The ideas were so fresh. The concept was so fresh. The gags were terrific. I'll always remember Pam's "second drink" and Michael's Chris Rock impression and Jim putting Dwight's stuff in the vending machine and handing him a bag of nickels and Dwight's drug testing escapades. I'll always remember those moments. This show was great. But it was great briefly, and it lasted so long.

And maybe it's unfair to hold against it something that so few shows have to deal with. But the longevity undeniably hurt The Office. It didn't flame out. It was more like a slowly dying fire. And by the point Michael left, the show was mostly embers. There have been moments, mostly in this season, where it's recaptured past glory. The latest episode was a lot of fun. But those moments are few and far between.

They ruined several characters along the way. Creed's punchlines just aren't punchy anymore. Kevin's stupidity is far more excessively moronic than it used to be, though he still can be funny in that stupidity. Angela and Oscar weren't up to the challenge of their weak shared plot involving the state congressman. Thankfully they never tried anything with Meredith.

The best example of a ruined character was Ryan, though. Ryan was such a terrific foil for Michael in the first two seasons. "Business School" is one of the best episodes of the show. But putting Ryan in charge was a misstep, and flinging him back to the bottom was an even bigger one. The laughs generated by Ryan in his final four seasons on the show could be counted on one hand.

The Office made a lot of mistakes. Parks and Rec hasn't. Just about everyone to have worked even a little with Michael Schur or Greg Daniels says they learned a lot from The Office's mistakes. They needed to. And it's shown.

 

I don't mind having characters who are caricatures. But the lack of consistency with the characters did bug me. The writers for a long stretch seemed to think that the funniest thing in the world was to introduce a character, give them some vaguely defining trait, and as soon as possible have the character act in the opposite way.

The worst victim was Gabe, but what they did to Robert California was also borderline criminal. Like Community with the darkest timeline, shows need to learn that just because something was cool in a one-off and fans loved it doesn't mean it's going to hold up to repeated appearances.

 

Of course, no one ever loved Gabe or Robert California.

Andy was the worst victim, though. Andy was a great ancillary character, but Ed Helms was such a great actor they kept trying to reinvent his character to keep him in the forefront. No iteration worked. Angry Andy might have been the most successful.