What Grabs the Heart

Talk to me long enough about television and you will eventually get me to talk about Lost.  Lost was absolutely my favorite TV show in high school and through college.  One of the first things I  did when I came home from serving my mission in Texas was to buy the last two seasons and spent a two-week marathon watching the series come to a beautiful, explosive, and poignant end.  I loved the heroism of Jack and Hurley; the romances between Sawyer and Juliet and Jin and Sun; the downfall of Sayid and Locke and the slow redemption of Ben Linus.  It was a great ride.

It also left me callous.  After watching Boone and Shannon and Libby and Charlie and at least half the cast croak before the series was close to ending, death does not bother me at all in fiction.  I’ve shed all the tears left in me for character deaths.

And this bothered me a little last week when I read the latest volume of Fables.  In this installment, two of Bigby and Snow’s seven children take the leading role.  These children are approximately seven- or eight-years-old and in it, one of the children is kidnapped and the other goes off to rescue her.  Without giving away too many details, her brother reaches a point where he has to sacrifice himself in order to save her.

It’s a raw, brutal moment when this eight-year-old boy, alone, starving, weak, and frightened about what he’s about to do, still expends all of his energy to prepare his blood to be shed, otherwise he loses his sister.  The worst is that he knows there’s a chance that nobody will know what he did to save her and he still takes his life without hesitation.  And I felt nothing.

It was almost like the Friends episode where they realize Chandler doesn’t ever cry.  They asked if he felt anything when Bambi’s mother died and he said, “Yes, it was really tragic when the animator stopped drawing the deer.”

This is not me saying that the writers did a bad job.  They did a great job telling that story.  But with my prior experiences, I can’t experience that Fables story the same way now as I would have three years ago.  And I thought to myself, if matters of life-and-death have no emotional impact on me in fiction anymore, is it possible to feel any such turmoil or conflict ever again in a story?

The answer came when I finally got on Hulu and caught up on all the new Office episodes.  I don’t care what anybody says, that show got along fine without Steve Carrell.  His Michael Scott character was funny but nobody really cared about his happiness.  Everybody cared about what happened between Jim and Pam.  From their bad timing in other relationships to their dating, marriage, having their first child and onward have all been great rewarding moments.  They were and still are the heart of the show.  I’ve always cared about what happened between them because that relationship matters.

Starting with the episode “Customer Loyalty,” their marriage is heading for a cliff.  The story arc this season has been about Jim getting a new job with a start-up athletic company.  He’s excited about it, he works hard at it, and he spends a lot of time away from home.  It’s finally taking its toll on Pam.  I have to re-watch the last three minutes of that show where the two of them have the worst fight.  It’s wrenching, tragic, ironic conversation which unbeknownst to Jim, leaves Pam in tears.  It may be the strongest moment in the whole series.

It kept me up for an extra hour just marveling not just how well-executed it was, but the effect it had on me.  What a fascinating concept when a child’s death doesn’t make my heart ache even a tenth to seeing Pam weep in those fifteen seconds.

The Office is achieving greatness not just in filmmaking but in storytelling and I think will live past this generation of viewers.  Jenna Fischer, John Krasinski, and all the other actors and writers should be proud of what they’ve accomplished in these nine seasons of programming.  My roommates keep talking about how 30Rock is leaving on a high note.  While a good show, it’s nowhere reaching the human chord that The Office is striking on its finale.