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I agree it's way too soon for a literal reboot -- but as I understand it, what they actually have in mind is sending the same documentary crew to "a dying Midwestern newspaper." So it's a similar treatment of a different kind of office, a thousand miles away from Scranton, with of course a whole new bunch of characters.
I would certainly give it a chance if I could, but sounds like it'll be on a streaming service, and there's no high-speed internet available where I live. Maybe there'll be a DVD eventually.
Don't worry, liscarkat -- avortac4 doesn't think ANYTHING makes sense.
I think that Boromir (the OP) and avortac4 are talking about two different types of "replacement."
The OP appears to mean that Oscar would be the in-universe best choice (i.e., if Dunder Mifflin was a real company and the show's characters were its real-world employees). Much as I like Oscar as a (fictitious) person, I don't think he has either the relevant experience or the personality type to be a district manager -- not that the Scranton branch office is exactly teeming with good choices.
The response by avortac4 seems to be basically asking who would be the best "Michael clone" in terms of whether scripts would need to be altered and how the show's real-world audience would react, which is pretty nearly the opposite question. In this sense I agree that Michael is (mercifully) a unique (fictional) individual and therefore no plug-compatible replacement is possible.
I haven't yet gotten to that point on the DVDs, but my impression is that they picked a new manager from among the second-tier people, with some details of the show's dynamic changing accordingly -- just as would happen in a real-life company.
"They" in this case would be the Dunder Mifflin corporate office. Oscar is in the accounting department, whereas the company's business is sales, so they would see his job experience as irrelevant. But more importantly (to them) he's not even the manager of the accounting department, he's just a bottom-level employee.
This doesn't (necessarily) mean that I think Corporate is either stupid or evil, merely that when they make decisions about their remote offices, they can't rely on personal knowledge of the individuals involved, because they don't have much (if any). So they rely on statistics such as job titles, commendations, and number of years with the company.
I didn't recall her playing another role, but you're right -- in the late-first-season episode where Ben is born, she played "Nurse," presumably using her natural face and voice! I'll have to look for her next time we watch that one.
Right -- I see it as a human-interest documentary, more than a nuts-and-bolts kinda thing. Same sort of thing happened in the original British series, by the way, when the manager got laid off and took a job as a traveling office-supplies sales rep.
Relax, folks, it's not a reboot (with new actors in the old roles), nor is it a revival (a "where are they now" series with the original cast). As this article (from 9 May 2024)
<blockquote><url>https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2024/05/09/some-good-news-and-some-bad-news-about-the-office-reboot/</url></blockquote>
finally admits (despite calling it a "reboot" in the headline), the show-in-the-works is actually more of a spin-off, in that it merely takes place in Dunder Mifflin's fictional universe. The same documentary crew (presumably still unseen and unheard) is now filming "a dying historic Midwestern newspaper." So we'll be a thousand miles away with an entirely new cast playing entirely new characters (though I would personally not rule out a guest cameo or two from the earlier show).
As the article mentions near the end, the actual bad news for many of us is that the new show will apparently not air on NBC itself, but rather on its streaming service, Peacock. So its audience will consist mainly of people lucky enough to live in an area with high-speed internet service. If the show is any good, I hope there will eventually be a DVD.
In response to the original question, note that the A&E episodes are not AT ALL in the same order as Rex Stout's original stories (written between 1933 and 1974, though the stories used by A&E were all written between 1938 and 1966). We have the complete DVD set. The episodes on disc 1 are based on stories written in 1958 and 1965; disc 2 from 1949, 1952, and 1959; disc 3 from 1939, 1948, and 1956; disc 4 from 1954 and 1966; disc 5 from 1958, 1961 and 1962; disc 6 from 1944, 1946, and 1960; disc 7 from 1946, 1950, and 1955; and disc 8 (the pilot) from 1953 -- and the only reason I've listed the years sequentially within each disc is that I copied this information from my chronological list of Stout's stories.
As others have said, there may be an occasional reference to prior stories, but if so they will be explained well enough that you don't need to have seen the prior story already.
When people have dementia, they lose their recent memories first, then gradually work backward till all they remember is their childhood. When my mother no longer remembered having a daughter, I stopped calling her "Mom," simply to avoid confusing her. I mostly called her "Honey" after that, but I don't think it would have been wrong to use her first name.
I have no idea what the "official" reason is, but the practice does seem to have several benefits:
1. Using the same first name reinforces the public's awareness of the both the actor and the character (similarly to naming a show after its star).
2. Viewers don't have to remember two different first names.
3. Using different last names makes it easy to clarify whether you're talking about the actor or the character.
I think this is mostly done on sitcoms, where it's less likely to seem frivolous (or maybe it's just that frivolous is works better in a comedy). Of course there's Magnum, P.I. starring Tom Selleck as Thomas Magnum, and The Rockford Files, starring James Garner as Jim Rockford, but those are comedy-dramas, AKA dramedies, not straight dramas.
Come to think of it, I don't recall the Mary Tyler Moore Show ever saying what television channel WJM was on either. Maybe that sort of specific detail isn't allowed?
Or maybe they were intentionally keeping it not-too-specific in order to be more plausible. I mean, you'd need to see a list of all the TV stations in the Twin Cities area to know whether there's a WJM. But if they said it was, for example, channel 5, then all you'd need to do is turn your TV to that channel, and you'd either find that it wasn't in use or else that it was some other station, not WJM. Same idea with WKRP.
Yes, probably just random "set decoration." Mrs. Dubcek does refer to their apartment as "the attic," so there could be lots of little items that she didn't bother clearing out of it before renting it to them. Come to think of it, the little gnome statue gets fairly frequent attention from Harry, but I don't recall the Solomons acquiring it -- is he another Dubcek leftover?
If you're looking for the birdcage, it's to your left, toward the back.
A lot of interesting theories here, but (judging by what I've heard) decisions regarding TV shows are often made for much different reasons than most of us are used to. So now I'm trying to think what *might* have been a plausible TV-type motive for that misspelling.
1. Avoiding a possible lawsuit. -- FlushingCaps mentioned in the original post that there are "regular Cincinnati Reds" jackets with the same general appearance. Perhaps they wanted Venus to wear one of those, but whoever owns the rights wouldn't authorize their use, so they tweaked it a bit.
2. As a joke, either to see whether anyone was paying attention or maybe just an in-joke. -- Dunno whether anyone noticed at the time, but it sure has gotten people's attention in the home-video era!
3. Someone connected with the show wanted the rights to sell some clothing, mugs, etc. that didn't just say "WKRP." Problem is, there wouldn't be any market for the items until/unless people noticed the misspelling on the show (see #2, above).
At this point, I'm thinking most likely law-suit avoidance or in-joke, but I could be totally off base.
Thanks for the reminder, Kowalski! Well, this time I was able to take things in stride much better, probably because they didn't blindside me. Overall, I liked it just fine and was actually sad to see it end.
Andy had a "play list" that he wanted all of the DJs to use. Presumably it was the current top 40 plus some new releases. But Johnny preferred to play his own favorites from the past (and Venus seemed to have his own style as well).
It just occurred to me that one very plausible reason for the repertory company might be this: Because the show was filmed in Canada, they were required to use a certain percentage of "Canadian content." So not only are some of the continuing characters played by Canadian actors, so are many of the one-shot roles (and Kari Matchett is included in both categories).
They not only needed a lot of good Canadian actors, they needed ones who could reliably do a convincing US accent (due to most of the characters being from the US), and I must say they did a good job of that. I may be forgetting a few other incidents, but right now I only recall noticing one accent slip, from an actor who was in a number of episodes, but had the misfortune to have an "ou" word feature prominently in one particularly impassioned speech. (His character could, of course, have been a Canadian who had moved just across the border to New York State.)
Canadian actors in the series include the following
(from the 27 non-pilot episodes):
Colin Fox (Fritz Brenner, 25 episodes)
R. D. Reid (Purley Stebbins, 22 episodes)
Robert Bockstael (various, 19 episodes)
Kari Matchett (Lily Rowan & others, 17 episodes)
Steve Cumyn (various, 15 episodes)
Trent McMullen (Orrie Cather, 13 episodes)
Richard Waugh (various, 13 episodes)
Boyd Banks (various, 13 episodes)
Fulvio Cecere (Fred Durkin, 12 episodes)
Christine Brubaker (various, 12 episodes)
Saul Rubinek (Lon Cohen, 10 episodes)
That's 11 actors that I was able to confirm as Canadian who appear in at least ten episodes. There are only 8 other actors (including the leads) who appear in that many episodes.
<blockquote>"Rock" music/radio, in the context of the time of WKRP, is distinctly different from the early rock 'n' roll of the 50's & early 60's.</blockquote>
That's quite true -- and is the difference between what Andy wants and what Johnny actually plays.
<blockquote>By the late 60's/early 70's, rock format stations had largely moved to the FM band, which was capable of broadcasting in stereo, which was more suitable to album oriented rock.</blockquote>
That makes sense. I'm gonna guess that the album orientation was a cause and/or effect of the move toward "canned" (AKA automated) stations like the one that tried to hire Venus to "just sit around and be black." If you play whole albums at one stretch, who's even gonna notice whether there's a DJ or not?
I'm gonna guess you weren't listening to radio circa 1960. Back then, at least here in Indiana (around 100 miles from Cincinnati), rock 'n' roll and other top-40 music was pretty much exclusively on AM, with FM being devoted to classical music and other "grown-up" stuff. My husband says that had changed by sometime in the 70s, but it may have depended on where you lived. One of the extras on the DVD set mentions that at first they were assuming WKRP would be an FM station, till they realized that rock would be on AM -- so maybe the show's creators/producers/writers were remembering their own childhoods?
It sounds like you realize that the reason Cramer and Stebbins were missing was simply that the setting was outside of NYC. But I found the whole episode a bit jarring.
My husband and I are about halfway through reading Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe stories aloud, in chronological order. And each time we finish one that has an A&E adaptation, we watch that. We watched their "Immune to Murder" last night, and it looked to me like someone (screenwriter? director?) was being awfully "creative." Unlike the other episodes we've watched, there was a whole lot of original dialog (much of it very loud), and even some original scenes. The whole tone felt different from Stout's story and from the other episodes. (I could also mention that Wolfe did an awful lot of snarling and bellowing, but that is, alas, simply the way Maury Chaykin usually played him.)
They moved the ambassador's home country (never specified in Stout's story, but clearly somewhere in the Middle East) to a fictitious country in Latin America (and I think they mentioned the name of the county -- did anyone happen to catch it?). Couldn't they find Middle Eastern actors to play the ambassador and his wife?
The U.S. version at least had what I think was his voice in that scene. I was wondering if perhaps the actor wasn't available on the day they were filming, so his voice was dubbed in later -- but if that scene was longer in Europe, then apparently we just happened to miss out on seeing his face.