What has happened to The Office? Season eight is in full swing. I'm not the type of fan who wishes the series had ended with the departure of Steve Carrell, but season eight might have me changing my mind. Remember the Pilot, season one? At the time, characters lacked development. But it was the Pilot episode, and it serves as the basis for what sets The Office apart from any other situation comedy of its generation: realistic characters responding to realistic situations portrayed through documentary style camera work. Throw in Steve Carrell and Rainn Wilson, and you've got yourself a prime time, NBC, award winning comedy. The format we remember from the Pilot, however, has been replaced. The Office is heading toward a tragic destination, and Dunder Mifflin may never recover. The narrative is messy, undefined and predictable and the characters are nearly impossible to invest in. All the strengths that were built up in seasons one through five are gone, and we are left with nothing but a prime time television series, gasping for air and belching up pasta like Michael Scott on his last mile of the Michael Scott's Dunder Mifflin Meredith Palmer Memorial Celebrity Rabies Awareness Fun Run Pro-Am Race for the Cure.

Remember in season five when Pam is at the Pratt Institute in New York? Ryan, who has taken the receptionist role in Pam's absence, tells the camera in a talking head interview that he often catches Jim staring at the receptionist desk. The audience gets a laugh, but Ryan continues, saying it is nothing compared to the way Michael stares at him. The camera pans from Ryan, who is looking awkwardly at Jim, to Michael's office window, where we see through the venetian blinds Michael looking directly at Ryan. When he notices the camera, he turns away from the window and walks slowly back to his desk.

A documentary crew captured this scene. In season eight, that crew of scrambling cinematographers has been replaced by the 180 degree rule of continuity editing. The documentary allowed the characters to interact with each other in a way that was real. We weren't watching characters in an office. We were watching our parents. We were watching our friends. We were watching ourselves.

The documentary format gave the audience an emotional connection with the characters. In season three we watched as a camera zoomed in on a crying Pam, distraught by her failed engagement and hopeless devotion to Jim. She didn't know the camera was watching, which makes the scene that much more real. The audience is invested. Perhaps the best example of this tool could be when Michael recounts his feelings after learning about the death of his former boss. He says, "I lost Ed Truck, and it feels like somebody took my heart and dropped it into a bucket of boiling tears. And at the same time, somebody else is hitting my soul in the crotch, with a frozen sledge hammer. And then a third guy walks in and starts punching me in the grief bone, and I'm crying , and nobody can hear me, because I'm terribly terribly, terribly alone." The camera begins to zoom in close up to his face. We are laughing as he talks about frozen sledge hammers, but at the end of his confession, we see someone real, someone we can relate to and someone we care about.

Season eight of The Office is funny. But the characters are holograms of their previous selves. You can't touch them or feel them. You can only see them. The show relies on gimmicks. Kevin has always been the ironically dull-witted accountant, but the writers never made a conscious effort to portray him as such. In season eight, rather than allowing character attributes to rise naturally to the surface, the writers make a big splash. For instance, in the episode "Tallahassee," Jim finds Stanley sneaking rum into his soda during a workshop meeting. In The Office of my childhood, the camera would have located Stanley and zoomed in on him pouring rum into his glass, subsequently panning to Jim as he gives his wide-eyed smirk and shoulder shrug. However, in this episode Jim walks up to Stanley and says "Are you drinking Rum?" Stanley nods and adds a not so funny punch line relating to his being fat, black, lazy, or not interesting in his work. The old office assumed these traits would shine through. Now all the little surprises and laughs that come along with the shifty camera work and realistic portrayals of office life are gone.

Throughout season eight, the story has been driven by characters. This doesn't work for The Office. Michael Scott was a victim of the narrative, and that was hilarious. Now we are watching a show in which the narrative is a victim of the characters. The story has no direction. Dwight wants to become the Vice President of a division of Sabre in Tallahassee? Not the Dwight I know. I enjoyed watching the tension in Scranton between Dwight and Andy, as it was once Dwight’s dream to manage the Scranton branch. Why the sudden change in ambition? The show doesn't tell us. Why does Erin suddenly want to move to Tallahassee? Her only reason is to get away from Andy. Their tragically awkward relationship has been played with by the writers since her debut in Season 5, and the worst part about her sudden disappearance to Florida is that it is resolved just as suddenly as it began. Andy goes to Florida and gets the girl. What about his girlfriend? What about Erin's need for space? We aren't told. There are tensions at play in the eighth season that have immense potential. But the writers resolve these tensions too easily, leaving us with a bunch of characters who I don't really care about anymore and a show entirely stripped of narrative.

Many critics of the most recent season of The Office say that without Michael Scott, the show has no legs. Or no head. Or maybe no body at all. I don't agree. Television shows rely on narrative and style. Do I miss Michael Scott? More than anything. Do I get frustrated when Ed Helm's appears as a softer version of Steve Carrell's character? Yes. Do I get cringes when Pam asserts herself as the queen of the office, when her character's humor has always relied on her subtle confidence? Yes. Do I turn the television off when I have to sit through a five minute scene of Kevin ordering Girl Scout Cookies? Yes. The minute I found out Toby was selling cookies at the office, I knew how the rest of those five minutes would turn out. The people in the office are no longer people. They are caricatures. They are gimmicks. They are predictable memories of what used to be comedy. Has The Office outlasted its existence as a premiere example of a mockumentary television series? I don't think it has. But when I feel like I could write better jokes than whoever is sitting behind that desk on 30 Rockefeller Plaza, it begs the question of whether or not this show should still be on the air. I feel like I don't even know the characters anymore.

Bear Left Website

www.mynmi.net/student/yateswebb/bear

My first attempt at web design. This is a site for the band Bear Left, an Athens based rock/funk/jam/blues band. Check them out on the web or at a show in Athens! 

I'd love suggestions or comments on the site, particularly its design and style.

Thanks!

A Box of Sermons

       There I was, sleeping in the back of my Dad's 1994 blue Jeep Grand Cherokee on the way to Pearl, Mississippi. I loved that car. Pearl is a town famous to locals as the home of the Mississippi Braves and the best Bass Pro Shop in the state. Besides its residents, no one has ever heard of it. Getting to my grandparents house was always easy, even for a nine year old kid. You take the Jackson loop to Highway 47, drive until you've crossed over seven small bridges over seven small creeks. After the seventh bridge, you have officially entered into Webb country.

The first house you'll pass is my great Uncle Frank's. He lives across the road from his daughter, Dad's cousin, Lily. Between the first set of houses and my grandparents' house at the end live countless relatives, none of whom I have never met. I think they are either my third cousins or my great aunts, or maybe both. Uncle Doug used to live up the hill passed them, but he moved out after he divorced and converted to Mormonism. He runs a family farm in Water Valley now. My sister and I used to wake up in my grandparent's house at the crack of dawn, run across the small field that separated their house from Uncle Doug's, and wake up Lorrin and Erin, our cousins. They had a homemade treehouse, a trampoline, a pellet gun that my mom never let me touch, a computer, Jumanji the board game, and an Emu Farm. Yes, Uncle Doug raised Emus. Well, aside from his job with Terminex. I will say, raising Emus has its benefits. You'll never run short of Emu Oil or Emu Bug Spray- both of which we all seem to take for granted.
When you get to my grandparents' house, you'll hardly notice the driveway. The asphalt has faded and the shrubs haven't been cut in years. Take a left at Uncle Robin's trailer and head toward the farm house. Five or six cats will greet you at the doorstep. Three or four dogs will follow.

        Thanksgiving, 2011. This past Thanksgiving we loaded up the family Subaru Outback and drove out to Pearl, down the Seven Bridges Road, and up my Grandmother's crumbling driveway. The cats and dogs greeted us as we unpacked and moved into the cluttered, old farmhouse for the weekend. Uncle Robin came over and my brother, my Dad, and I helped him sort through one of the three cluttered trailers behind the house. My Grandmother has lived over eighty years on this earth and, to my knowledge, never thrown away a single possession she has ever owned. My Dad blames it on her being raised during the Great Depression. Regardless, there is no excuse for stuffing a bag cat food that expired in 1992 into a old metal trailer behind your house. The four of us started sifting through broken chairs and tattered paperback books. Uncle Robin stumbled upon a dusty picture frame and we all stopped our rummaging. Finally we had found something interesting. He showed it to us and I couldn't believe it. It was a picture of the farm taken in 1963. The entire property has since succumbed to the overgrowth of weeds and trees. The three trailers that now sit behind the house were nowhere to be found, and in their place was a small, wooden outhouse.
My dad spotted it first. He walked outside to see if it was still there. About thirty yards behind those shit-filled trailers, in the woods next to a fallen oak and a thicket of thorns was a broken apart outhouse. We made our way through the brush and hanging tree limbs out to the wrecked, old outhouse that my Dad and his brothers had to make use of every summer they'd spend at the Webb family farm as boys. After what seemed like thirty minutes of pushing through branches, scraping our knees and arms on bushes of thorns, we made it out the the outhouse. The first thing Uncle Robin pulled out was a rusted spring cot frame.
        Perhaps Grandma Bonnie felt she would someday put good use to that cot, just as she had had the tattered books and broken lamps in the trailers. We continued to dig through the outhouse, which had, over the course of time, been filled with scrap lumber, broken pipes and hornets' nests. I began filing through the junk, tossing aside empty, cracked picture frames and wooden boxes filled with torn up paper. When we finally made it through the collected mess in that outhouse, my brother called us over to one box. Dad opened the box and pulled out one of hundreds of scraps of paper. The first line read, in an unmistakable type-writer font, "June 4, 1975- A Message on Love, I Corinthians 13." The two men, my father and my uncle, dropped the junk in their hands and stared at the box at my brother's feet.
        The box was filled with Grandpa Wilbur's old Sermons. Every single one of them. It took my father days to sort through them all. Grandpa's ministry had spanned decades. It had moved his family across the southeast. The only service I got to attend with him was his last, on that gloomy morning in a white church in late October. We carried the box back through the woods and into my Grandma's house. I immediately went for the one on top. I Corinthians 13. "If I have the gift of prophesy, and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, And if I have a faith that can move mountains, But have not love, I am nothing."
        Love is an heirloom. It is a family watch that continues to shift gears. It is a box of sermons, an old spring cot. It is a small Mississippi town and a dusty picture frame. It is a 1994 blue Jeep Grand Cherokee. And even though I haven't seen that car in over ten years; even though it is probably crushed to pieces or broken down or sitting in some old guys garage, I know it is out there. I'd like to see that Jeep again someday. Maybe I will.

Budweiser Advertising

For the entirety of its existance, Budweiser has served America under a single defining title: the King of Beers. Two campaigns have served this King's purpose of protecting and creating a brand heritage that is is and always will be distinctly American.
       Through adaptive advertising and groundbreaking creative work, the Budweiser Clydesdales have protected the heritage of the Brand for 75 years and counting. They have never ceased in representing the brand, even as times changed and Americans grew. Born and bred in America, these horses and the word "Budweiser" are one in the same.
      Through emotional advertising and immersive marketing strategies, Budweiser's "Grab some Buds" campaign has served as an opportunity for a young and proud American generation to get involved in the Budweiser legacy. With the use of social media and provocative television ads, the King is calling all Americans to seize life and enjoy friendship, all while drinking good beer.
      Every advertising campaign tells a story. Whether it is the unique preservation of a brand's heritage or the extraordinary invitation to live life in good company, Budweiser continues to reinforce the idea that they aren't just selling beer, they are selling emotion. When you crack one open, you are cracking open both a deep history and an even brighter future.

*An excerpt from an Advertising project I worked on.