--- title: Review of The Office Season Finale, "Search Committee" description: Spoilers for last night's season finale of The Office below: There are three ways to look at "Search Committee": (1) as an episode in itself,... canonical: https://time.com/archive/7126513/office-watch-youre-not-the-boss-of-me/ author: TIME Staff article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2011-05-20T13:47:31.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-16T07:10:59.400Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: Review of The Office Season Finale, "Search Committee" og:description: Spoilers for last night's season finale of The Office below: There are three ways to look at "Search Committee": (1) as an episode in itself,... og:url: https://time.com/archive/7126513/office-watch-youre-not-the-boss-of-me/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Review of The Office Season Finale, "Search Committee" twitter:description: Spoilers for last night's season finale of The Office below: There are three ways to look at "Search Committee": (1) as an episode in itself,... twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # Office Watch: You're Not the Boss of Me > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) May 20, 2011 1:47 PM UTC by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) May 20, 2011 1:47 PM UTC I was walking around midtown Manhattan this week when I noticed a news organization with its zipper open. The zipper in question was the headline ticker around a media building on Sixth Avenue, and the news it was announcing was that a group of amateur astronomers in Sicily had just launched a cannoli into space, sending it into the stratosphere attached to a balloon. According to the zipper, the cannoli achieved “low orbit.”OK, leave aside for the moment that the Sicilian Major Tom made it no higher than 18 miles (30 km), which looks a little like space, but isn’t. Going into orbit, even a “low” one, requires not only much more altitude—on the order of 100 miles (160 km)—but much more speed, at least 17,500 miles per hour in the flat (28,100 km/h). The balloon, you might expect, didn’t quite achieve that. \[newsletter-the-brief\] In fairness, science errors are everywhere and if-it’s-high-up-it-must-be-in-orbit is a comparatively mild one. In no particular order, here is the incomplete, by no means definitive, often painful list of the ten most common scientific misconceptions.You can kill a virus: No you can’t. You can deactivate it, destroy it, but you can’t kill it. The reason: it wasn’t alive to begin with. One of the requirements for life is the ability to reproduce and the virus is out of luck on that score. It survives only by carjacking a cell first.Jonas Salk discovered the cure for polio: Discovered? You mean like the last guy who used his desk left the recipe in a drawer? It took eight years of work in a basement lab at the University of Pittsburgh to do what he did. And it wasn’t a cure—there’s never been a cure. Salk created a vaccine, which means, even now, that if you don’t get it and you contract the disease, there’s no help for you. Listen up, anti-vaxxers.The dark side of the moon: Pink Floyd, I blame you. For the last time: the moon has no dark side. It does have a far side—which has just the same waxing and waning light the near side does. Album titles ain’t science.Asteroid, meteor, meteorite, what’s the diff? Location, location, location. An asteroid is a big rock that’s out there. A meteor is a big rock that hits our atmosphere. A meteorite is any chunk that hits the ground—or your house or your head.It’s hot outside: Depends. The temperature at the center of the sun is 27 million °F (15 million °C). The hottest temperature ever achieved in a particle accelerator was 7.2 trillion °F (4 trillion °C). By contrast, the coldest temperature possible, known as absolute zero, is -460 °F (270 °C). In other words, we live only about 500 degrees from the rock bottom of the temperature scale and trillions of degrees from the top. Bundle up.If it’s called a theory, it’s the same as a hunch: That’s true sometimes, when you’re just beginning to look into a phenomenon. But after a while, the word merely means that you didn’t actually see the event play out—even if all the evidence tells you what happened. The theory of evolution? A fact. The Big Bang theory? A fact. But unless you’re 13.8 billion years old, you weren’t here to witness it all.Lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place: Lightning actually doesn’t care. Tall buildings get zapped a lot. Park ranger Roy Sullivan was lit up seven times in his career—before committing suicide in 1983\. Can you blame him?The seasons are caused by distance from the sun: Seems to make sense. When the northern hemisphere leans toward the sun it’s closer and so it’s warmer; when it leans away, its further so it’s colder. But that’s not it. The Earth is 93 million miles away from the solar fires, so a little tilt this way or that doesn’t really matter. It’s the angle at which the sunlight hits—low and oblique versus straight on and hot—that makes the difference.Primitive humans and dinosaurs crossed paths: Yes, there are people who continue to believe that. No, it’s not true. We were separated by a good 65 million years. Indeed, it’s the extinction of the dinosaurs that made room for little rodent-like mammals (read: your ancestors) to venture out of the shadows and take over the world in the first place. Wilma, we’re home!One false move and a particle accelerator will kill us all: There was a lot of hand-wringing about this back in 2008 when the Large Hadron Collider was about to be switched on and doomsayers predicted it would create an artificial black hole that would eat Europe. It’s true that some of the most powerful and violent events in the universe are recreated in colliders, but in miniature—a few harmless particles at a time. Relax and enjoy the bosons.Read next: 5 Myths and Facts About Your Microwave \[video id=tmGTDYff\] Listen to the most important stories of the day. They're everywhere, they're maddening—and they just ain't so. Here, in no particular order, is the incomplete, and by no means definitive, often painful list of the most common scientific misconceptions out there _Spoilers for last night’s season finale of The Office below:_ There are three ways to look at “Search Committee”: (1) as an episode in itself, (2) as a way of judging the overall success of season seven of **The Office** and (3) as a table-setter for the extended life of Dunder-Mifflin without Michael Scott. I want to have something more positive to say, but my gut reaction to the hourlong season-ender on each score was: (1) disappointing, (2) mixed at best and (3) incomplete—obviously—but I wish I had more to be hopeful about. moreAs to the first: sure, I laughed at the episode. I could give you a whole list of funny lines and moments, which, in fact, is most of what makes up my notes. Get a cast this talented playing characters with this much history in a high-stress situation, and they are going to make you laugh. (“Shut up about the sun. _Shut up about the sun!_” That is comedy! I admit it!) But there’s a difference between a bunch of laughs and a satisfying story. By The Office’s seventh season, the cast has developed into an almost endlessly adaptable comedy troupe, and honestly, some of the episodes I’ve enjoyed best this season played almost like a series of vignettes and set pieces that allowed the characters to just be. By the serial nature of the interview process, “Search Committee” lent itself to that sort of format too. At its best, though, The Office is a show that can be absurdly funny while grounding itself in legitimate real-world stakes. In “Search Committee” the stakes were theoretically there: the branch needs a new boss; this will have a big effect on everyone’s daily lives; career paths will be affected; and Jim stands to be in huge trouble if they make the wrong choice. But the interviews, which played like a long series of goofs, were too detached from reality to underscore that—compared with, say the Michael Scott Paper Company arc—this was also about a real decision that is actually important to these people. (Case in point: Dwight Schrute has always walked a fine line between absurd and implausible, and we all have different opinions about where that line is. But to me, while having him accidentally fire a gun worked—it grew out of character and his exuberance—the “burn victim” ploy, though a funny sight gag, was too blatantly a boneheaded, sitcommy ruse for me to believe that even Dwight would think it convincing.) The big hook of the episode, the string of celebrity appearances, in some ways worked better than I expected; having the stars troop in for brief interview cameos was a (relatively) natural way of working them in. James Spader killed as an overqualified candidate who was creepily perceptive, which is probably the most James Spader-y kind of role I can imagine working in the world of The Office; Ray Romano’s hangdog role was fitting; and while David Brent would have had greater impact had he not appeared on the show earlier, Ricky Gervais can always find something in that character. (I’ll get to Catherine Tate in a minute.) But I’ve never quite understood the idea that The Office needs to bring in an outside candidate—or that Dunder-Mifflin does. The cast is huge already, and brilliant; and we’ve learned over the years that for all their eccentricities, many of these staffers are really good at their jobs. Promoting from within makes sense both within the show and in the meta sense of casting. And of course that’s still possible—we won’t know for a while. But it seemed like, once the writers (the episode was credited to Paul Lieberstein) decided on the cliffhanger, they needed to sabotage each Dunder-Mifflin candidate for comedy and suspense. And that worked against a lot of what we know about the characters: Darryl proved able to grow into his new job, but “Search Committee” made him seem like a fraud; Andy seemed (to my eye) to handle Gabe’s hostile questioning very well, but we seemed to be meant to feel that the interview had gone badly. Hell, even Kelly has shown in the past that she can be cunning and insightful in a pinch. Given the cliffhanger resolution, I should have ended the episode with a strong rooting interest or interests. But instead of giving us a summer to argue which of the candidates best deserves the job, the episode mostly made it seem like nobody does—and didn’t give us strong reasons to care. I say this with some regret, because I haven’t soured on the past year or so of The Office as much of the online criticism has. Yeah, OK, the show is definitely off its peak, and it may never match seasons 3, 4 and 5 again. But while this season was uneven, I generally enjoyed it and thought it improved on the rudderless season 6; it redeemed itself writing off Michael Scott and—at least last week, with the Dwight interlude—made me believe that it could continue just fine with the rest of the characters. But I’ll admit: “Search Committee” had me wondering whether the show can go anywhere good from here, and whether I care. Catherine Tate has recently generated a lot of buzz as a favorite to take over as an outsider, but the episode didn’t make me enthusiastic. Not because of Tate, whom I like as an actress and had been enthusiastic about, but because of the character, who didn’t really seem defined as a person beyond a certain abrasiveness and eagerness to embrace extreme management styles. To me, that sounds like the stuff of a mini-season arc—a la Will Ferrell—not a series regular. (Ditto James Spader, though I do think he slew the performance.) Nelly’s friendship with Jo is a way of forcing us to accept her intellectually as a plausible candidate, I guess, but you can’t force the audience to connect with a character. Can The Office turn this into a resolution that works, rejuvenates the show and makes it compelling to watch again next year? Sure—the nature of a cliffhanger means that we have to wait and see. But it was a cliffhanger that did not leave this viewer’s fingers grabbing the cliff as tightly as I’d like. Now the hail of bullets: \* OK, we might as well, have a discussion about it: who do _you_ want to see as the new boss? My hope—and still my longshot fantasy—was that Jim somehow gets drafted over his objections or, realizing that any other choice is a disaster, selects himself a la Dick Cheney running Dubya’s VP-search committee. I don’t think that will happen, but I will go to my grave, or the Rapture, believing The Office missed an opportunity by yanking Jim out of the boss’ office too soon. \* Speaking of Tate/Spader/whoever joins or takes over: what are the odds this “cliffhanger” actually lasts until fall, or anywhere close? If there’s an “outsider hire,” someone will have to be cast, a contract signed, episodes shot. That can’t hold until July at the outside, right? And if The Office hires no one, that too will out, won’t it? \* I skipped over the various subplots, but: I liked how the episode treated Phyllis and Erin’s brief mother/daughter illusion, sweet but not maudlin or drawn-out. (“I’m sure I was just another Porky’s baby.”) Andy and Erin? I’m one of the minority (I think) that actually wants them together and cares, but Andy’s sudden realization that he no longer feels it for Erin—or maybe he does!—just seemed like a device to string out a will-they-won’t-they that has gone on far too long. And like Oscar, I can’t help looking forward to Angela’s wedding, disastrous as it will be. \* “Bread is the paper of the food industry. You write your sandwich on it.” \* “Little advice? Take a day off from the whole ‘Jim’ shtick. Try caring about something. You might like how it feels—James.” _Noted_. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7126513/office-watch-youre-not-the-boss-of-me/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7126513/office-watch-youre-not-the-boss-of-me/"},"headline":"Office Watch: You're Not the Boss of Me","datePublished":"2011-05-20T13:47:31.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-16T07:10:59.400Z","description":"Spoilers for last night's season finale of The Office below: There are three ways to look at \"Search Committee\": (1) as an episode in itself,...","url":"https://time.com/archive/7126513/office-watch-youre-not-the-boss-of-me/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"TIME Staff","url":"https://time.com/author/time-staff/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/7126513/office-watch-youre-not-the-boss-of-me/","name":"Office Watch: You're Not the Boss of Me"}}]}] ```