The Office Season 4
Overview
Jim and Pam are finally, actually together — and season four wastes no time cashing in years of build-up, letting them be a couple in public while everyone else's love life falls apart around them. Michael (Steve Carell) opens the season by hitting Meredith with his car and then staging a charity fun run to cure rabies, because of course he does. Ryan's back from New York as a bearded corporate VP pushing a website nobody wants, Andy Bernard is courting Angela with a cappella and grand gestures, and Dwight is mourning in ways that involve a lot of sitting in stairwells. The centerpiece is 'Dinner Party', the excruciating condo episode — Jan, the candles, the tiny plasma TV, the 'babe' — that fans still rank among the greatest sitcom episodes ever made. There's real tenderness underneath it all: Pam chasing her art ambitions, Michael meeting Holly, the new HR rep who might actually understand him, and going sweetly, hopelessly soft. The writers' strike shortened the season, but it hardly matters. It ends with a proposal, a betrayal and a goodbye in the same hour, and somehow all three land.
