Written by: tbd
Directed by: tbd.
Summary (NBC): Following Ryan’s recent scandal at corporate, Holly must hold a business ethics seminar. The meeting gets out of control when Michael lets everyone speak freely about their unethical behavior at work. Meanwhile, Jim makes Dwight comply with the company’s “time theft” policy.
The return of ‘The Office’ was everything I wanted it to be. Jim finally proposes to Pam and all is right with the world. I was afraid that when he decided not to propose during Tobey’s going-away party that they would somehow break up. But my fears were for naught as Jim got down on his knee and asked Pam to marry him at a rainy rest stop not-so-halfway between New York and Scranton.
The rest of the episode was great too but that moment was a long time coming.
Okay, so good moments aside, what is the deal with Pam’s college friend? Are they going to turn that into a ‘thing’? And what is up with her taking ceramics and what sounded like a Biology class? I thought she was just there for a 3 month quick course in graphic design. Maybe the writers just didn’t think about that. Or maybe they know very little about graphic design, which was evident by Pam’s Typography teacher’s joke that didn’t make sense about the font Zapf Chancery.
Something that irked me towards the end was that no one called out Jim for being soaking wet when they were weighing themselves on the giant scale. I was really expecting them to force him to take his clothes off. Part of me even thought they might all take their clothes off to trick the scale. Oh well, ‘The Office’ isn’t really about people being naked all the time unlike other shows (’Grey’s Anatomy’).
I thought this was a great premiere and I can only hope the entire season is this good. Though, really, when has ‘The Office’ ever let us down?
What did you think about ‘The Office’ season 5 premiere? Did you get teary eyed when Jim proposed? Did you laugh out loud at Dwight hammering fruits into the vending machine? Were you shocked at the return of Ryan, the ‘fired-guy’?
On The Office, you know him as Dunder Mifflin’s Assistant Regional Manager (ahem, Assistant TO
the Regional Manager) Dwight Schrute, who never met a client he couldn’t woo, a Star Wars scene he couldn’t quote or a beet he couldn’t farm.
But in real life, Rainn Wilson’s a pretty normal guy … or is he? We caught up with him at this year’s Comic-Con in San Diego, and though we decided to take pity on him by not grilling him about the upcoming season of The Office, we did glean some interesting, dare we say Dwight-esque (Dwight-onian?) tidbits from the Man Who Would Be Schrute.
What can I ask you that everyone else isn’t already asking?
Don’t ask me what happens on season 5.
What do you do at your desk when the camera’s not on you?
One thing that really dominates the fall and winter is fantasy football. So I spend a lot of time on the fantasy football sites, noting down potential replacements for injured players, draft picks, stuff like that. I tried online poker, but then sometimes the camera would move to me and I’d be right in the middle of a big bid, so that didn’t work out. I tried online chess, but the connection was too slow for the Yahoo! servers, and we couldn’t get a good chess game going. But you know, I do a lot of the websites, news sites, stuff like that. Just kind of Googling myself, over and over and over and over again.
Are you in a fantasy league with people from the show?
Yeah, we have one on The Office. Brian Baumgartner, who plays Kevin, won last year. I came in like fourth or fifth, but the year before, I won — I rode LaDainian Tomlinson to victory.
What’s the oddest thing you ever found Googling yourself?
Oh, there have been so many. I was recently on a website where it was like, “Rainn Wilson spotted in New York with mystery woman!” And it was a photo of me and my publicist, going to Regis Philbin’s show, on the sidewalk.
If Dwight were here at Comic-Con, what would he be dressed up as?
He would dress as Michael Scott. And he would immediately die. Dwight would be so happy coming to Comic-Con, that his skin would melt off, like those Nazis from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and we’d just find a pool of Dwight by the entryway.
What can you tell me about your role in Transformers 2?
I had one day there [on the set] playing a college professor. Finally, Rainn Wilson and Michael Bay have worked together! Now America is happy.
Check out some pictures from THE OFFICE’s season five premiere episode, “Weight Loss” airing Thursday, September 25 on NBC (9-10 p.m. ET).
The Office is back with a new season. This episode “Weight Loss” promises to be funny as hell. There is so much opportunity for awkward moments here that you can’t wait to see what they will come up with.
You can see more photos from 
The Office “Weight Loss” below.
Episode Synopsis: “Weight Loss” - For the first time, we see what happens over eight weeks of the summer, as a Dunder Mifflin weight loss initiative causes the branch to diet and become obsessed with their weight. Michael (Steve Carell) pursues a friendship with his new HR rep, Holly (Oscar nominee, Amy Ryan). Jim (John Krasinski) misses Pam (Jenna Fischer) who attends art school in New York. Dwight (Rainn Wilson), Andy (Ed Helms) and Angela (Angela Kinsey) attend to unfinished business. B.J. Novak, Kate Flannery, Mindy Kaling, Oscar Nunez, Brian Baumgartner, Leslie David Baker, Phyllis Smith, Creed Bratton and Craig Robinson also star.
(Photos: Chris Haston)
Any DVD set that has The Office on it is going to be good. That’s just a fact. So obviously, The Office: Season 4 DVD set already has a lot going for it. So what I was mainly interested in when I received it was how they dealt with their shortcomings: namely the fact that due to the writer’s strike, this set only has 14 episodes.
While The Office fared much better than other shows with its truncated season, I still expect a DVD set without a full season’s worth of episodes to have enough bonus features to help make up for it. While the features on this set are pretty standard (deletes scenes, blooper reels, commentaries, etc.) for the most part, the quality makes you forget that the set is light about ten episodes.
I love it when I get bonus physical items like postcards or stickers when I buy a set like this, so I was quite excited to see that this DVD set comes with a shooting script for “Dinner Party,” which was the first episode back after the strike. My only complaint is that its designed to fit in between the DVD case and the outer box, making it difficult to wedge it back in after you take it out.
Deleted scenes are pretty standard on DVDs, and I generally find them boring. More often than not, you watch them and realize there was a good reason that they didn’t make it into the finished product. However, with The Office, the deleted scenes are almost as good as the episodes themselves. First of all, there are a lot of them. The DVDs include deleted scenes for each episode and when you hit “Play All” on a disk, you won’t be finished for quite a while.
What’s also great about them is that they flow together relatively well. When I was watching them, I was reminded of the Will Ferrell movie Anchorman, or more specifically, the second movie they cobbled together from all of Anchorman’s deleted scenes. The deleted scenes from The Office are so good that they could almost make up their own episode.
Another standard DVD feature that The Office does exceptionally well is Episode Commentaries. These are always hit or miss, but the actors and writers on The Office are so ridiculously funny that watching an episode with commentary is again, almost like watching a bonus episode. Plus, it’s always interesting to hear the writers who play parts on the show talk about the episode without being in character. It’s fun to hear Mindy Kaling sound smart and together, unlike her character Kelly. It was also heartening to hear Paul Lieberstein sounding a lot less… pathetic than Toby usually does.
Other highlights for me included Michael Scott’s “Rabies: The More You Know” promo, Michael’s Dunder Mifflin ad and the “Summer Vacation” promo that NBC ran ahead of the 4th season last year. Every time Ryan says the line, “I think I dated a black girl,” I crack up.
Not everything in the special features section is great, though. The blooper reel was surprisingly disappointing. I turned it on hoping for interactions between cast members, line improvisations, and just general behind-the-scenes-shenanigans. While there was a little bit of that, mostly it was a cast member looking at the camera, flubbing a line, and laughing. I understand that when you’re punch drunk and in the middle of your fifteenth hour in a seventeen hour day, the fact that you’re unable to say “sex addict” is hilarious, but for the viewer at home, it just gets a little repetitive.
Another feature I was looking forward to was “Writer’s Block,” a segment from the Office convention. Not having been able to attend the convention myself, being able to see at least some of it on the DVD set sounded great. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. The segment looks like it was shot by a random audience member. The sound doesn’t come from the soundboard, instead it’s just ambient. Despite the fact that the camera seems to be on a tripod, it’s still ridiculously shaky. I was really looking forward to hear all of the show’s writers talking about the different episodes they worked on, but the poor quality made me give up after about five minutes or so.
At the end of the day, this DVD set is about $30 online. Even if you only watch the special features once and read through the “Dinner Party” script, you’re still getting your money’s worth. While season 3 is still my favorite season of the show, the 14 episodes that season 4 does have are great. If you’re a fan of The Office, you’ll definitely want to add this set to your collection.
Hello again, everyone! This time we’ve got five copies of The Office - Season Four on DVD for five lucky, random commenters. The DVD is available in stores starting today.
To enter, leave a comment below before 5:00PM Eastern, Friday, September 5 simply telling us your favorite moment from The Office. As always, we’ll randomly choose five winners amongst the eligible entries. Some other details:
