I dreampt of a Reno 911 - The Office Crossover
/Some might say I’ve spent too much time alone since the pandemic started, but this blog post may convince you that I haven’t spent damn near enough time in isolation. A few days ago, I posted this on Facebook:
Like most people, I've spent these troubled times at home streaming my favorite TV shows. I can’t really count the Star Trek series since even before COVID-19 they were part of my regular binging the way a Mormon leaves their TV on the Hallmark channel. It may surprise you to find out I subscribed to CBS All-Access to watch Reno 911 and not Star Trek: Discovery or Picard. Maybe I'm in the same camp as the curmudgeons that didn’t like “the new Trek'' when Next Generation came out, or maybe I just see an embarrassing attempt to squeeze some leftover juice out of a franchise that was mostly forgotten because so few people truly understood it. Gone are the Greek-inspired stories of morality and man’s place in the universe in an attempt to show us a better, brighter, future that works for everyone in favor of flea market quality writing and a teenage angsty disregard for the franchise in favor of violence and “woke” culture. But I digress…
I’m finding myself watching a lot of my favorite comedy series. The need to laugh through the alienating, cosmic horror, we’re all currently living through has been my major emotional outlet when not working or tinkering with a side project. F.R.I.E.N.D.S is a semi-regular binge-worthy show for me, but mainly because of the nostalgia of watching it as a kid and thinking that was what adulthood would be like. Quite frankly, I'd rather take this seemingly unending darkness over the reality those characters live in.
The Office has been my favorite “landing pad” after a long day of pushing pixels for clients that don’t appreciate me or the talents I bring to the table. Maybe it's the escape or how relatable working for a paper supply company is to designing apps and building high-resolution 3D renders of point clouds for fluid dynamic visualization is - as I do. It kind of doesn’t matter what you do for a living, you end up working for a semi-incompetent buffoon who's been promoted to incompetence. I think that’s why we all love Michael Scott so much. He’s the idiot boss who's totally harmless. Somehow, being able to say “I’m glad that's not me” is part of why we all love him. You could extend that notion to all of the characters from The Office but then find yourself participating in the dynamic contrast of watching Jim and Pam and actually seeing the ironic authenticity of their relationship and being “’awww, I want that.” I’ve had the entire show on a revolving loop since this distressing year started, and I have watched the entire series through a couple of times since it came to Netflix. I live alone in a beach condo along the San Francisco coastline, so having it on in the background while I’m working makes me feel slightly less alone when I wonder if that's fog or smoke blanketing the neighborhood. Spoiler alert, it was smoke all year long. I’ve had several dreams about working in that office, but nothing really interesting occurred aside from a strange rivalry I felt with Ryan when standing over the copy machine. It’s a there's-only-room-in-this-office-for-one-of-us type of feeling. I’m sure that would be considered a huge red flag to my therapist. Spoiler alert, I'm Californian, we all have them. Frankly, some would consider this entire post a huge red flag, so bare with me.
Last night I subscribed to CBS-All Access (no I don’t have a brand deal with them) just to start binging another one of my favorite comedy series from the days prior to streaming. I was just as big a fan of Reno 911 in the early 2000s as I was The Office much later on. What’s weird about Reno 911 is how prolific it was when it was running on Comedy Central, but how strangely hard it is to find on streaming services now. I can say now with full confidence after Quibi closed its doors 6 months out of the gate that it is one of the most cliche examples of why you don’t do tech startups in Los Angeles. It's why trying to change an age-old paradigm is the unique province of San Francisco. In L.A., the unending pursuit of fame and fortune in the most shallow of hedonistic ways i.e. “Look at me! I’m pretty! Give me a tiny bit of the love I am fundamentally incapable of providing for myself” strikes a very shortsighted cord with something like tv binging. Sure, we prefer seeing pretty people in our media but how we interact with the software providing that media is the broader view that gave rise to the San Francisco-based startup culture. The contrast between L.A.’s “aren’t my washboard abs hot?” vs S.F.’s “stand before the irreconcilable size of my intelligence”. That isn’t to say that San Francisco is somehow “better”. I’m saying, in San Francisco, when you purchase an overpriced murphy bed for your overpriced apartment just so that you can have a home office, it takes one app designer / 3D artist, one medical plastics engineer, and one guy with a Ph.D. in ultra-low-temperature physics three days to assemble it. But once again, I digress...
Reno 911 was an early application of the now tried and true mockumentary format, and that's what made the show work so well. It also helped that the actors portraying the characters were less well known than someone like Steve Corell, and it was easier for the “believability” of Reno 911 which is the keystone of the mockumentary genre. That being said, the movie Reno 911: Miami is easily one of the most criminally underrated films of the last twenty years. Back in 2007, my friends and I rushed to go see it in a movie complex in Fremont, CA because it was the only place anywhere near us at the time playing it. In the early, totally broke, days of college, it was normal for all of us to get together on a Friday or Saturday night to watch reruns of Reno 911 and Chapelle Show.
Reno 911’s character Jim Dangle is as central to the show's success as Michael Scott was to The Office. Somehow, even with the contrast between the show’s subject matter, the idea of both the bosses being these lovably weird bumbling buffoons was what laid the canvas for all of the other characters' oddly authentic eccentricities. Both shows are just as accurate of a commentary on modern times as any great episode of Star Trek. The cringe humor of both Reno 911 and The Office is really just a mirror being held up to society. In The Office, the awkward humor that is the real-life analog of the awkward anxiety people working in an office feel comes from cramping people into a box from radically different walks of life and expecting them to all reach an average ambient temperature. This is all for the benefit of a company but is, ultimately, meaningless to the employees beyond a paycheck. Their characters are emergent from this environment. In Reno 911, the characters from radically different walks of life aren’t expected to be anything other than the peacekeepers in a sort of aging, unkempt but mopped, fast food restaurant bathroom floor of a town that is Reno, Nevada. As with The Office, the characters have emerged from the environment they inhabit.
Put simply, the humor in The Office is derived from the lost, meaningless, mentality of corporate life. And the humor from Reno 911 is the drive each character has to protect and serve in a place that natural selection has been trying to weed out.
This all being said, the Facebook post about a Reno 911 - Office crossover was inspired by a dream I had last night. I dreamt I was sitting in Michael Scott's office while he sat there with his face buried in his palms. He was having me take notes on an apology he wanted me to write and hand-deliver on his behalf to Deputy Jim Dangle. Dunder Mifflin had accidentally printed an erotic cartoon on a series of fliers meant for the Reno County Sheriff Department's Pancake lunch voucher. I was to meet Jim in a hotel lobby and personally apologize on behalf of Michael Scott. Yes, as a writer I do actually dream in full narrative. If there is a giant purple elephant riding a unicycle in my dream, it's there to serve the plot. It’s a little awkward to admit, especially in a blog post that this is how my subconscious works. But, once again, I digress…
I met Jim Dangle in a hotel lobby. There was a stone fireplace behind him as he stood there at the concierge service desk. Behind the desk was a wrapping staircase that stretched up to the second floor with a giant floor-to-ceiling window to the rear of it illuminated by a flow of natural light. I shook his hand as he stood there clutching one of the misprinted pancake lunch vouchers. I distinctly remember not wanting to look at the voucher, scared it would make me laugh, and did my best to hold eye contact with Jim through his mirrored sunglasses as he stood there chewing gum. I remember saying, “On Behalf Mr. Scott, from the Scranton branch of Dunder Mifflin, I’d like to apologize for the Utica branch’s screw up,” ready to throw Karen’s branch under the bus. Things cut back to Michael in his office, “Being a good boss means sometimes you have to take one for the team when your team screws up. But then sometimes someone else has to take one for your team when your team screws up. What can I say? The paper industry’s tough.”
I passed Jim Dangle some sort of manila envelope. He took it and thanked me for the apology. He explained that the cartoon was funny but they had been receiving angry calls from the parents whose kids attended the youth center where the pancake lunch was held. The dream ended after Jim said “It’s just that it made us look stupid in front of the fire department. That's all.”
It was so lifelike. To one degree I was watching it but to another, I was experiencing it. I actually woke up laughing.
If this story wasn’t weird enough, I snuck in an episode of Reno 911 before starting work and was utterly shocked to see the room from my dream with the stone fireplace and the wrapping staircase.
From Reno 911 S1E9 - Garcia’s Anniversary 2003 and The Office S6E4 - Niagra: Part 1 2009
For some reason, my subconscious stored the fact that both shows used the same hotel for a brief scene nearly 6 years apart, and, for some reason, it was the setting for the dream. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. It was like suddenly thinking of an old friend you haven't seen in years then a few hours later they add you on social media. If ESP is a thing, you’d think my brain could find better uses for it.
