Monday, November 20, 2023

Shakespearean Deep Cuts from The Office

"Broke." By Charlie Grandy. Perf. Steve Carell. Dir. PSteve Carell. The Office. Season 5, episode 23. NBC. 23 April 2009. Deleted Scene. DVD. Universal Studios, 2009.

Having covered the overt and canonical Shakespeare-related material in The Office, it's exciting to discover even more material waiting in the deleted scenes.

In this episode (which aired on the date we commemorate Shakespeare's birth), the small Michael Scott Paper Company is going up against the much larger Dunder Mifflin Paper Company, and it feels like David against Goliath:


Michael, Pam, and Ryan are each David, and they're going up against another David—David Wallace, the CEO—but that David is really Goliath. The Shakespeare comes in the last analogy: Charles (the manager of the Scranton branch of Dunder Mifflin) is Othello, apparently for no better reason than that Michael needs to reach for a person from classic literature who is black.
Links: The Episode at IMDB.

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

 —The Tempest