The Office's Best Episode Made Michael Scott More 'Pathetic' Than Ever
"Dinner Party" is often considered the best episode of "The Office," and part of that comes down to how it's structured less like a standard sitcom episode and more like a horror story. This is a haunted house episode, except the monsters in the house are Michael and Jan, and their ghastly nature is uncovered piece by piece until it crescendos into a terrifying mess of built-up rage and grievances. The horror movie tropes are all over the place, including that necessary "point of no return" plot point where the heroes' attempt to leave backfires. The moment Michael tells Jim to ignore his fake apartment flooding, Jim and Pam know they're trapped in this nightmare for the rest of the evening. If they're gonna get out of this alive, they'll have to face it head on.
Jim and Pam are always the show's audience surrogates to some extent, but "Dinner Party" dials this up even further by limiting the talking head clips to just them. Usually, Michael gets to talk directly to the camera to explain why he's acting so bizarrely, but outside of one Dwight talking head in the cold open, "Dinner Party" clings hard to Jim and Pam's point of view. They're the only ones who get to explain their thoughts, which means Michael and Jan's disfunction is denied the usual softening-up we'd get from Michael's light-hearted explanations. The result is a portrayal of the couple that is far harsher than anything we'd seen from them before, straddling the line between deeply funny and deeply sad.
Turns out, this was the main mission of the episode. As writers Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg explained in a 2018 oral history for the episode, the goal of "Dinner Party" was to give us Michael at his most pathetic.
Dinner Party is set in the worst period of Michael's life
"There are lots of different versions of Michael Scott," Stupnitsky explained. "Some writers would write him as childish, others would write him as incompetent, some would write for the version of Michael Scott when he was at his best. We were trying to get him at his most pathetic."
Sure enough, "Dinner Party" finds Michael in one of the saddest periods of his life. He's so desperate to have Jim and Pam over that he pulls an elaborate scheme to trick them into it. Then he spends half the evening pretending to be happy, bragging about his tiny TV or how Jan makes him sleep on the foot of his own bed. It's also strongly implied that Jan took her young male assistant's virginity at some point, and she flaunts that affair in Michael's face as a passive aggressive revenge tactic. All of this would be sad on its own, but the fact that Michael's trying to portray it all as relationship bliss takes it to another level. As Eisenberg explained:
"Michael so wants to be friends with Jim and Pam, and the idea of having people over at his house for a dinner party is something I feel like he's dreamt about for years, with having a girlfriend and being proud of her and all that. He still tries to push through in spite of the fact that Jan is clearly on the edge and in spite of the fact that their relationship is crumbling. He's trying to put on this facade."
An Office episode years in the making
The most interesting part of "Dinner Party" is how it serves as the culmination of four seasons of Jan gradually deteriorating psychologically. She starts off the show as a relatively well-adjusted character, more of a straight man for Michael's comedic nonsense to bounce off, but slowly she unravels into an eccentric character in her own right. In other series, this might come off as uninspired or as another case of Flanderization, but "The Office" successfully turned it into a believable, tragic arc of Jan having a seasons-long mental breakdown.
Coinciding with Jan's downfall is the ongoing arc of Michael trying to have a happy family life. He wants so badly to have a nice wife in a nice house with kids on the way, and "Dinner Party" shows just how much he'll cling to this illusion. For the writers, showing that dissonance in Michael's thinking — the sheer size of the gap between Michael's delusions and his actual situation — is the key to making this such a classic episode. As Eisenberg put it:
"At the beginning of the episode, you kind of know that the relationship isn't great, but then, as you continue to watch it, it's like, 'Oh, my God. He's trying to get investors in her candle company. Oh, my God. They hate each other! Her assistant wrote a song about her.' That's the peeling of the onion of it."
Alas, "Dinner Party" marks the end of Jan's time as a regularly-recurring character on the show. She returns once a season or so afterward, but this was the permanent, climactic breaking point of her and Michael's relationship. Farewell, Jan. You may not have been a perfect fit for Michael, but of all his love interests, you were definitely the most interesting.