Dwight Schrute Was a Warning
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These are boom times for the lolsob. Watching the news, I sometimes find myself staring at the screen, eyes wide, brain broken, not sure whether to laugh or cry. The farce and tragedy tangle so tightly that it can be hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. How do you make sense, for example, of a leader who, in the midst of a deadly pandemic, muses about the curative powers of bleach? How do you process a president’s attempt to edit a hurricane with a Sharpie? The words, after a while, stop working. The categories collapse. Many true things have been written about what living under this regime feels like; one of the truest I’ve encountered is a 2017 prediction from the writer Hayes Brown: “This is going to be the dumbest dystopia.”
Even the escapism acknowledges the whiplash. As people and , many are also watching a sitcom that, as one of its executive producers , “mixed melancholy and joy in the same space.” is 15 years old and one of the . Its renaissance has many explanations: The show is streaming on Netflix. Its mockumentary style—the playfulness it brings to its tales of the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company of Scranton, Pennsylvania—gives it in the age of the reaction GIF. The series resonates emotionally with. And it resonates politically through Michael Scott, the boss who is convinced that the solution to any problem is to put on a good show. I’m one of the people who have found new solace in old episodes of , but I have a slightly different reason for watching. That reason is Dwight Schrute.
