It appeared in 2005 as a carbon copy, yet another American remake attempting and failing to recreate the magic of a British sitcom. The abbreviated first season — six episodes dumped into the wasteland of March and April — featured a few promising moments, but nothing that augured the greatness to come*. It was merely a derivative show with a few entertaining elements, some likable actors and an interesting documentary-style presentation that made it look and feel different from every other sitcom on television.

(* – Just one example: Amy Adams, who would reappear later, was a bit player in one first season episode, less than a year before her first Oscar nomination and two years before she became a movie star. A future movie star and four-time Oscar nominee, buried right there without much fanfare.)

But when it returned for its second season, “The Office” was a show transformed. Greg Daniels, who created and adapted it (and who has, relatively quietly, racked up a stellar comedy resume: “The Simpsons,” “Saturday Night Live,” “King of the Hill,” “The Office,” “Parks and Recreation” and an episode of “Seinfeld”), found a tone that worked. They largely made this happen by shifting the way they treated the star and central character. Daniels has given a lot of credit for this to “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” which was a surprise hit betweeen the show’s first and second seasons.

Steve Carell’s Michael Scott went from being a callous, unfeeling ass — basically, he went from being Ricky Gervais a character played by Ricky Gervais — to being a misguided, likable loser. The character himself was endlessly annoying, but he was played beautifully by Carell, who never won an Emmy for the role for reasons passing understanding. He managed to imbue the role with a lovely humanity, with the sense of this being a real person with understandable motivations, frustrations and beliefs.

This is where the show shined. Yes, it brought cringe humor into the mainstream of network television, and it helped bring the mockumentary format to television (paving the way for as-yet-unexplained uses of the format, i.e. “Parks and Recreation” and “Modern Family”), and its influence can be felt across the entire landscape of televised comedy, etc., etc. The thing that always struck me about this show was that if it wasn’t billed as a comedy, it felt like it could have been (at least early in its run, but more on that in a moment) one of the best dramas on the broadcast networks. These characters felt so lived-in, so real (well, not the likes of Dwight or Creed), less like a sitcom cast and more like a bunch of funny people playing funny characters.

It was this ensemble that often brought “The Office” praise, because even if the main storylines faltered, you could count on something from the supporting cast to warrant a few laughs. Some of these characters did morph into caricatures as time wore on (again, I’ll get to the later seasons issue, promise), but for a long time they felt like people unlike those you’d find on any other sitcom. On “Friends” (or its descendants like “How I Met Your Mother” and “Happy Endings”), characters are always ready with a quip and a quick joke. On “The Office,” the characters made comments that worked because of what we knew about the characters themselves. This wasn’t interchangeable humor; it was character-based.

Of course, the show’s beating heart for a long, long time was the Jim and Pam romance. John Krasinski and Jenna Fischer were great, sure, of course, and the storyline was rather masterfully done. While these characters had little to do in the later years (and I know other people feel they became unlikable, but I never felt that; I just thought they stopped being central and started seeming like they were floating around in search of a purpose or a worthwhile storyline), right up until their wedding and the birth of their first child, they had comedic highs and rather great romantic, dramatic and almost soulful lows. The will-they-or-won’t-they thing has become a bad, overused cliche, but it was one handled perfectly here.

Still, the show’s greatness came from the fact that it felt like it centered on realistic-enough characters in a realistic-enough world. Even when things got cartoonish or — to use a dreaded phrase — too sitcom-y, there was a humanity in the writing and acting that kept it grounded for years. And at one point, for about one year, it was the best single comedy on television and on the short list of the best things on television, period (from early 2006, when “Arrested Development” was on the way out, until early 2007, when “30 Rock” had pretty clearly figured itself out; though your feelings on this may vary because “30 Rock,” like “Arrested Development,” was a rapid-fire joke machine and not terribly comparable to “The Office”).

The importance of Steve Carell at the center of this operation was never more obvious than when he left the show after its seventh season. Everyone seems to have a different opinion of when “The Office” stopped being a great series. My opinion, for whatever it’s worth, is this: It had four seasons where it was either excellent (the second and third seasons) or very, very close to it (the fourth and fifth seasons). The sixth season, though, fell short of those highs. There were occasional episodes that worked (the wedding and birth episodes), but for the most part it began to feel like the show had run out of steam. Storylines were introduced without much thought as to where they would go, and characters began to feel like they were running in place. Nothing about it was bad, nothing about it was offensively stupid, but nothing was great and nothing was really memorable or up to the standards that had been established. The seventh season, which doubled as Carell’s farewell tour, was a similar story: It didn’t live up to what the show had been, but there were some episodes and storylines (the episodes with Amy Ryan’s Holly, for instance, and Steve Carell’s sublime final episode).

The eighth season saw a show attempting to simultaneously focus on its ensemble while also giving us James Spader’s bizarre turn as the company’s CEO and, at the same time, turning Ed Helms’s Andy into the new Michael Scott. It didn’t really work. The show was clearly spent. That’s why the news that it would go off the air was welcomed by fans like me; at the very least, having an endgame in mind could help it go out on a high note. This season has not been the show’s strongest, and it felt just as meandering as the last few years have been.

But as they approached the finish line, there did seem to be a new energy in the storytelling and the actors. Maybe I’m only saying this because I recently shotgunned several episodes in one sitting. I had lost interest right around the time we got to the episode that was a backdoor pilot for a spinoff centered on Dwight (Rainn Wilson) — not enough interest to ditch the season recording or delete the episodes, but whenever I sat down to watch a show, the slowly-accumulating episodes of “The Office” never even entered the discussion. With the finale approaching, my wife and I decided to run through the half-dozen episodes that awaited us, and they were…really enjoyable? Not all of them, nor every storyline, of course. Seemingly every decision the show has made with Andy since Steve Carell left has been ill-advised (it got to the point where, when he missed a stretch of this season to film the third “Hangover,” I couldn’t remember where he was or if he was still dating Erin) (oh, since I mentioned her: Erin, the phenomenal receptionist played by Ellie Kemper, was the best thing about the show’s last four years). Yet the penultimate episode, focusing as it did on the relationships that powered the show when it was at its best (Jim and Pam, Jim and Dwight, Dwight and Angela), worked wonderfully. It reminded me of why I once loved this show and why it was once essential watching. 

Still, the main reason “The Office” still exists is the same reason “Chuck” lasted for five seasons and “Parks and Recreation” is heading for its sixth: It premiered on NBC after “Friends” ended. “The Office” debuted during the 2004-2005 season, NBC’s first without “Friends,” a season that saw the network try “Father of the Pride,” “Committed” and the immortal “Joey.” The network kept churning out new shows that summarily flopped, and so, improbably, they kept having to air shows with dedicated fan bases and relatively meager ratings (namely: “The Office,” “30 Rock,” “Parks and Recreation,” “Community”).  Somewhat improbably, even as it lagged behind pure garbage like “Two and a Half Men,” “The Office” did actually become something resembling a hit for NBC. Its popularity with the all-important 18-to-49 demographic — the only one advertisers care about, because people in that range buy things — and its success in syndication rendered it the unlikely elder statesmen of the NBC comedy world.

Sure, the show isn’t going out at its peak. Few shows do. Maybe they appear briefly as flashes of brilliance and get axed before their time (“Arrested Development,” “Freaks and Geeks,” et al), or they air a few really good years and a few meh ones and then eventually trundle off (“The West Wing”), or — for quite a few shows — they exist, never approaching greatness, filling space for some untold number of years before moving on to do the same thing in syndication. The fact that “The Office” became tepid after its midway point doesn’t lessen just how good it was for those four seasons, the same way the first handful of “Simpsons” seasons will always be among the best things ever created on television, regardless of the fact that nobody remembers a single thing about any “Simpsons” episode produced after 1999. In the long run, these weaker years don’t serve to lessen what came before. It was, and will always be, among the best comedies ever made. Not a bad turnaround for a show nobody thought they wanted.

Genuine knowledge gained through hard work and a keen intellect is not a MEME. We all have instant and constant access to the infinite range of human understanding, and it doesn’t mean anything because we wouldn’t even know what to do with it if we found it. But here comes a dude who actually does, and that, it turns out, is the neatest thing of all.

This Gabe Delahaye post at Videogum about the great Neil Degrasse Tyson, and about how Neil Degrasse Tyson isn’t just a great astrophysicist and a prominent museum director and a popular Internet guy but how he is also just a guy who knows lots of things, is really terrific.

(The post is vaguely tied to the news that Neil Degrasse Tyson will host Seth MacFarlane’s “Cosmos” reboot, which was first mentioned in 2011 and which was re-confirmed this week. If you were curious.)

So! Vin Diesel is the star of the “Fast and Furious” movies. He also has a lot of Facebook fans. Let’s dive in:

You’ve developed a big following on Facebook. What do you attribute that to?
Did you ever see the movie Social Network? Do you remember what they said the reason was to make Facebook?

To meet girls?
YOU GOT IT!

Let’s pause and appreciate Vin Diesel shouting “YOU GOT IT!” at the interviewer while discussing “The Social Network.” 

And when they made the movie, nobody had a million fans. They were promoting it, like, “We came up with a new way for people to check marital status.” That’s not what Facebook was. That’s not why Facebook would be successful. No one gives a s— about people’s marital status. That’s as dated as MySpace!

Vin Diesel may not know this because he is a big movie star who uses Facebook as a way to engage with the millions of people who pay to see him in “Fast and Furious” movies and nothing else, but there are people out there who are not big movie stars who spend their time making “Fast and Furious” movies. There are people out there who are just normal folks working their jobs and checking Facebook to kill time and, very often, perhaps not all of the time but at least some amount of the time, using it to see if someone they like is already in a relationship or what the deal is there. For a lot of people, Facebook wasn’t about individual relationship statuses, but for at least some folks, it was one of the things they would find on the site. But dope MySpace reference.

What Facebook didn’t realize is something very big was about to happen

Hang on, I want to pause and savor this moment where Vin Diesel, star of “The Pacifier” and “XXX,” is recalling that time he was onto something big regarding social networks, something so huge the Facebook people didn’t even realize was about to happen. Okay, back to his recollection:

What Facebook didn’t realize is something very big was about to happen, and that was — for the first time in history, and it’s kind of a fluke they didn’t see this coming — when I jumped on that page in April 2009, I started talking to people. In the realest ways. Imagine if you could’ve been a Facebook friend to Marlon Brando, or whoever your role models are. Imagine, if you were able to Facebook Elvis, and talk to him, and hear from him without the Hollywood of it all. That was the Fast & Furious experience.

Just imagine Facebook friending Marlon Brando or Elvis and talking with them, multiply that by about 10,000 million, slap some NOS onto that and maybe you’ll have the tiniest inkling of what it was like to hear from Vin Diesel when he joined Facebook. It was Brando plus Elvis times infinity.

And he wasn’t just talking. He was talking in the realest ways. I mention this because he had just snarked on MySpace, and one of the big things about MySpace when it had its brief moment in the sun was that celebrities could use it to directly interact with fans. But sure, the first time in history, realest ways, 2 Brando 2 Furious, please continue. 

So, when I had started my page, the only person that had a million fans was Barack Obama. Because it was first-quarter 2009, and he’d just got elected as President, because of social media. So, when I started talking to the fans, I became the No. 1 page in the world. Over Coca-Cola, over huge companies. And it was only because I said: “Hi, guys, I love you.”

Hi guys, Vin Diesel loves you.

Look, Diesel is obviously big on Facebook. (That’s how the kids talk: “Big on Facebook,” they say, in between Snapchats and twerking and watching “NCIS,” probably.) He has 41 million likes! That’s a lot of likes, even if a “like” is a really arbitrary metric and we’re not going to sit here pretending that likes, follows or anything of that vein are actually meaningful numbers in any sense of the word. (Also, according to his Facebook page, Vin Diesel was born on Nov. 30, 1999. So he must be excited to be 13 years old, finally old enough to see a “Fast and Furious” movie. Congratulations to Vin Diesel!)

Vin Diesel, circa 2009, was…not a big star. People still remembered him from “The Fast and the Furious” and “XXX” (god, remember “XXX”?) and maybe “Boiler Room” and, if you had young children, perhaps “The Pacifier.” But he was not really a movie star, and then came “Fast and Furious” in 2009, which was a big hit, and “Fast Five” in 2011, which was a massive, monstrous hit.

My point is that when Vin Diesel says he started using Facebook in April 2009, it already had 200 million users. There was a high-profile movie about the company’s origins in the works. Obviously the number of users has skyrocketed since then, but do we really think it’s because Vin Diesel posts hilarious or adorable stuff on his wall? Sure! That must be why 1.1 billion people use the site each month. For Vin Diesel.

Facebook used to ask me to come up to their office to explain what the f— I was doing, and why I had so many fans. What was unique was: I never let anyone do a post, I never let anyone post for me in the last four years. My audience knows me so well on the page that if my producing partner’s in the room when I post, they’ll know somebody was around me. That’s kind of cool, that’s how sophisticated they are.

Vin Diesel is a brand, but that’s fine. All of the major stars in sports, entertainment, whatever, they’re all Brands when you boil it down. They’re all people finessing and promoting and fine-tuning Jonah Hill Inc. or whatever the hell you want to call it, and for many of them that involves using social media to engage the rabble, just like Coca-Cola and Nike and whatever else. As long as he has a certain degree of self-awareness, and as long as he realizes that he’s just the star of a long-running movie franchise who happened to be the first movie star to use Facebook in this way, and that ultimately he’s just someone using a marketing tool to promote himself and his work, that’s really not too objectionable. Anything else, Vin?

Facebook really owes me billions of dollars. But whatever. [Laughs]

Billions! I didn’t hear the tone he used, but I am going to assume he was being self-deprecating and in no way half-serious in that “Ha ha I think they should give me money, ha ha I am not kidding as you can tell from my forced chuckling!” way. Because what kind of person would say that seriously?

Oh. That’s right.

[via Uproxx]

Here’s the first trailer for “Gravity,” the highly-anticipated Alfonso Cuaron movie about two astronauts (played by Sandra Bullock and George Clooney) trapped floating in space after their space station is damaged. It’s really just about two people isolated in the middle of nowhere and what happens, only the middle of nowhere is the unending abyss of space, which is a horrifying concept if you stop to think about it. The trailer masterfully sells that idea, while giving us just enough of the plot and the mood without telling us too much about how the story progresses.

Cuaron’s last movie, “Children of Men,” came out in 2006. It was very good, as Cuaron’s movies tend to be very good, and it featured several prolonged sequences without any cuts. These scenes are technical nightmares to stage and shoot but are phenomenal to watch, and Cuaron is reportedly planning on similar scenes for this film. I mention all this to say that it’s been far, far too long since a new Cuaron movie landed. “Gravity” arrives in October.

[via]

In recent years, as most of the network shows I watch have either wound down or become unwatchable, this has been less and less of an issue. Most of my favorite shows — the shows I feel like I have to see — aren’t on the broadcast networks. The shows I liked on the broadcast networks this season are, for the most part, ending on their own (“30 Rock”) or are safely returning (“New Girl”). There are shows I used to like, and those became poor shadows of themselves (“Community” and “The Office,” which is also ending). There are really only two shows on the so-called bubble I really wondered about: “Happy Endings,” a delightful live-action cartoon that remains in limbo (though I’m oddly confident in the reports that it will be picked up by USA), and a show that I really like and highly recommend but also a show that is just very entertaining; and “Parks and Recreation,” the best show on network television for a few years now. I like “Happy Endings.” I love “Parks and Recreation.” And so the fact that NBC has opted to bring it back for a sixth season is just terrific.

This? This. Oh, and obligatory.

But if you don’t feel like reading it, perhaps you’d enjoy this short film created by the folks over at The Glossary. It doesn’t cover the entire speech, instead using an audio excerpt to bring some of it to life:

You can listen to audio of the entire address here.

As I’ve written before, “Man of Steel” has potential. The initial trailers and information made it look perfectly fine, but there are some aspects (namely, Zack Snyder and Superman as a big-screen character) that have kept me from being too excited.

This trailer, which arrived on Tuesday, moves me firmly into the excited camp. It’s a really good trailer! And at the very least, it looks like they found a different way to tackle Superman. (Having Amy Adams and Michael Shannon in the cast, in addition to Christopher Nolan’s involvement, does inspire confidence.) I still feel like we have no idea how the actual movie will work if it’s a two-hour exegesis of Superman’s tortured psyche, but I am curious to see how they mix that with a superhero origin story.

Well, that definitely looks terrific. I like how the scenes on Earth evoke the similarly lived-in feeling of “District 9,” that sense he created of a world with its own texture and history, rather than another cold, polished CGI construct. Remember how Blomkamp almost directed the “Halo” movie, but that fell apart, so he went ahead and wrote and directed two sci-fi movies instead? I’m sure his “Halo” would have been interesting to see, but instead we got a pair of original films: a phenomenal one in “District 9″ and, now, a very promising one “Elysium.” I can’t wait.

[Yahoo! Movies]