A rant, if you will.

Back when I had started college, the terms Central Perk or Ross-&-Rachel would have drawn a blank stare from me, I would have thought that The Simpsons was something in the line of The Cranberries or The Beatles, and I would have been horrified at the idea of concentrating, let alone enjoying, anything that had a ‘laugh track’ as an integral part of it.

Five years later, I am a convert. I am still not a TV show junkie, but I will happily take these (generally) easily digested pellets of humour and suspense and romance and heartbreak when I get hold of them in between spurts of work and study, thank you very much. They go down well with boredom or weepiness or my quick meals. That’s not to say that TV shows don’t deal with serious matter in a serious manner. There have been shows on medical riddles and prison politics and the World Wars to go by a few mainstream examples off the top of my head (and I’m sure there are many more as, or more, nuanced), it’s just that my personal taste has veered towards the comic variety. 

And it is a particular trend in a kind of comedy show that has increasingly been catching my eye. The shows I will talk about, now that I think about it—can be thought of as a subset of comedy. The comedy around the ‘institution’. The show generally centers around a group of quirky at best, dysfunctional at worst individuals, brought together by a workplace or a government department or an educational institution. 

Let’s take The Office, for example. It’s set in a paper company in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It tries to be ‘real’, and thus has people looking pretty or tired or cranky or mutinous by terms, but hardly ever glamorous. Up to a point, it succeeds. Michael Scott, the infuriating boss and the selling point of the show—is a perpetual foot-in-the-mouth bumbler. The central pair, Jim and Pam, have a rather lovely understated chemistry. Once you get used to the secondhand embarrassment that Michael causes, you may just learn to sit back and enjoy these characters stumble around each other.

I did. Till I got to the Toby bits.

Toby Flenderson is the HR representative, soft-spoken, divorced, and bullied incessantly by Michael. There’s a flimsy veneer of logic attempted by the fact that Toby is the only one in the office that Michael Scott has no real control over, given that he is from the Human Resources department. But no one, ever, at least in the first 6 seasons that I watched, stood up for him. And here's a sampler of the kind of things that is said to him:   

Toby Flenderson: We should really have the office's air quality tested. I mean, we have radon coming from below. We have asbestos in the ceilings. These are silent killers.
Michael Scott: You are the silent killer. Go back to the annex.  

............................

Michael: Toby is in HR which technically means he works for Corporate. So he's really not a part of our family. Also he's divorced so he's really not a part of his family. 

............................

[Handing Toby a present at his farewell]
Toby Flenderson: Wow, thanks, Michael, I didn't expect you...
Michael Scott: [cuts him off] Can I just say that of all the idiots in all the idiot villages in all the idiot worlds, you stand alone, my friend.  

............................

Yes.

So Michael is insensitive, insecure, heart-in-the-right-place but perpetually annoying and intrusive. So he does not know or care that he is bullying a co-worker. What makes me intensely uncomfortable is the one that out of all these people in the office, no one else seems to find this wrong enough to protest.  

Then there's the obvious choice to follow The Office, Parks and Recreation.

Set in the, what else, the Parks and Recreation department in a town, the star of the show is the quirky, driven, workaholic, chatterbox Leslie Knope. 

You know why this is great?

Because it promotes a positive self-image for someone who might talk a little too much, love her job a little too violently, be a little too bouncy and assertive about what she likes and wants for her town to pass quietly over. I love that Leslie is not chill about life and that is okay in the scheme of the show.

What I hate however is that in this positive work environment-there's Jerry.

Jerry is overweight, likes his food, in his later middle age, and seems to be of a happy disposition that tries to please everyone even though he might not always be in the loop any more.

These are a few things that are said about Jerry in the show:

  

And when it is discovered that Jerry seems to be enjoying this picture-perfect family life with a gorgeous wife and three beautiful daughters-the reaction across the board is of blank disbelief.

Because someone who is routinely bullied in office and thus sometimes a tad awkward must be a failure in every possible sphere in his life.

This infuriates me. This is like a vicious progression, with no rhyme or reason or humour whatsoever to recommend itself to me. Really, am I missing something? These character arcs are not funny, they don't achieve one single bit of story progression and growth, and there is not even an attempt at motivation or justification offered. It seems to be set forth as a given that these men will have misbehaviour meted out to them. In fact, in P-&-R, it is not just one person like in The Office but the entire cast who seem to scoff at this man, whether it's on his farewell or he breaks his arm or his sleeve catches fire.

I hate it. If this is a TV trope which we are supposed to get I hope that it dies and a quick and painful death soon. If this is an innovation then I hope the creators get it into their heads that not every office needs a Toby or a Jerry and it does not make the show more real to include a token office scapegoat. If you can be bold enough to talk about real people-unprinked, unmanicured, and unexciting-here's hoping that you don't need to pick one of them out to vent all the pent-up gags.