Lanch party!

Can we go back to 30-minute episodes of The Office? These hour shows every week are just too much. What was the focal point of tonight's episode again? Bad pizza? Kidnapping? Ryan's a tool? IM gags? Pam and Jim discuss relationship minutiae that no one else would find remotely interesting?

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I give it a C, since there were still some funny lines and moments. Will's point about the British version wrapping things up after two seasons looks prescient. As much as anything, the Jim-Pam thing could have ended on the right note, not with the two talking about yogurt on the roof. Were my expectations too high entering the season? Was the show ever really as good as it was in my mind?

So many of these plot lines center around intra-office romances or hook-ups -- potential, imagined, current or past: Jim-Pam, Michael-Jan, Ryan-Kelly, now Darrell-Kelly, Roy-Pam, Roy-Angela, Meredith-Michael, Toby-Pam, now Meredith-Jim, Angela-Dwight, now Andy-Angela. What's next, Dwight has a torrid affair with Phyllis and she breaks up with Bob Vance of Vance refrigeration? It's becoming like Friends with ties and less Italian stereotypes.

Anyway, there were still parts that made me chuckle:

Kevin on the Lunch Party sign: "Maybe you could just change the U to an A."

"Three reams - in your face!" (Not as funny now as I remember it being at the time.)

Angela to Pam: "I would like to have a relationship with a man."

Kevin on Pizza by Alfredo: "It's like eating a hot circle of garbage." (Ditto from the three reams comment.)

The staff in unison: "A medium amount of good pizza."

Did Rainn Wilson forget to shave before shooting this episode? Or is that stubble just meant to illustrate how he's falling apart without Angela.

Also, another couple of outbursts from Carrell that we haven't seen from his Michael Scott in awhile.

I think there's one more hour-long episode to go before we can get back to normal, can't happen soon enough.