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I need to get this off my chest:
If you follow The Office, you may remember from season 4 that Angela breaks up with Dwight over the somewhat mysterious circumstances of her cat's demise. Andy appears to win Angela's affections when he buys her a new cat, but is clearly unhappy with him by the time he proposes to her. For reasons the show doesn't bother to explain, she accepts Andy's proposal anyway, yet immediately cuckolds him in a secret affair with Dwight.
You might think there is enough weirdness here already for comedic purposes, but now let's add that the show portrays Angela as not only an outspoken Christian, but a Christian of a particularly uptight variety. Yet not only does she have romantic relationships with non-Christian men, but the show doesn't hesitate to toss an unconflicted adulterous affair on top of this.
The show's writers are just plain lazy. They're reaching for a grab bag of behaviors and characteristics they regard as unpleasant and dishonorable and dumping them into a single character without even a nod in the direction of internal consistency. "Hey! Let's make the character we've spent four seasons building up as a religious prude cheat on her husband-to-be with the old boyfriend who killed her cat! Yeah, that makes sense!"
This isn't just Φ griping about religion in the media. Sure, I want to see Christianity portrayed positively, but I'll recognize that while the Angela character is exaggerated (it's a sitcom, after all), some of us can come across as a little uptight to outsiders. And since the format requires that everyone's lives revolve around the office (like I said, it's a sitcom), there wasn't any room in the show to have Angela meet guys at, you know, church or something.
But if there is a profile for an adultress, surely Angela is its exact opposite. And, okay, sometimes people break their profiles, but that would require a complexity that the writers never wasted on Angela. Instead, they simply defaulted to simply making the Christian character look as bad as possible.
4 comments:
Have you heard the show's writers commentary on this? In their own clueless Hollywood way, they're trying to show that Dwight is Angela's true love and that she doesn't truly care about Andy; she just doesn't want to be left on the shelf and Andy's her only real option now. Since Andy is essentially presented as a joke, we're not supposed to care. Indeed, carrying a torch for Dwight makes Angela more sympathetic to viewers,not less. We're supposed to root for Dwight & Angela. Basically, don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence.
A less outlandish example is that few felt sorry for Roy (or were critical of Pam) for the whole Pam/Jim thing (because the show was clearly on their side and we were not encouraged to care about Roy), but would probably break out the pitchforks if Pam were to cheat on Jim with another man.
I never actually took Angela's Christianity very seriously. It mostly seemed like a vehicle for her prudishness. Not just on the part of lazy writers (though there is that), but there are people I've known in real life that I suspect hide their prudishness behind religion. I do, however, consider the betrayal of her prudishness to be as significant (and disappointing) as you consider her betrayal of her religion.
I'm willing to bet that Andy is a nominal Christian of the hyper-WASPY variety. My thought was that was one of the reasons that Andy was palatable to her in a way that Dwight wasn't. He was someone that she could at least take home to the family without having to explain away certain... consistencies.
Also, they did sort of explain why she's with Andy and not Dwight. Phyllis said that she's risk-averse and Andy is not a risk. That sounds about right. Dwight has a lot of... unique... ideas about everything and challenges her worldview. So I guess the characterization goes that on one hand she is drawn to that but on the other hand she likes the idea of being the alpha in the relationship.
Like you, though, I just don't see how she handles this conflict as being in keeping with her character at all.
Gcatal,
What Pam did to Roy is not comparable to what Angela is doing to Andy. Pam was kissed and in a moment of weakness she kissed back. Then she realized that something wasn't quite right and (after I gather a brief attempt to make it right) broke off the relationship with Roy (notably, without the safety net of Jim). Very different.
I know - I was referring to the different way the audience views these characters. If Pam were to cheat on Jim with another man, it would be a huge deal on the show because people care about Jim and take that relationship seriously. We would be made to feel that Pam had done something really wrong. Andy is basically a two-dimensional character who serves as comic relief so Angela cheating on him is reduced to a sight gag that has little weight. It's not meant to say anything about Angela's morals/Christianity or make us feel upset on Andy's behalf, it's just supposed to crack us up and remind us that she still carries a torch for Dwight.
And if Pam were to now carry on a friendship like she had with Jim with another man (i.e. with obvious romantic tensions), the audience would certainly sympathize with Jim in a way they didn't with Roy, who was basically just written as a jerky walking obstacle so we could cheer on Jim & Pam's burgeoning feelings for each other. It's hard for the audience to root for a romantic pairing when in order for it to succeed, a well-loved character has to be dumped.
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