And the obliteration of the paper business is only destined to get worse: in the early 2000s, when The Office is set, the internet was rapidly increasing in popularity, and with it, physical paper was becoming less valuable.īut Michael is still desperate to uphold the ideal of a sales-based workplace, and, ultimately, the modern corporate man. From Season 1 of The Office, the Scranton, Pennsylvania branch of the Dunder Mifflin paper company overseen by Michael Scott is on the precipice of demise. An old-fashioned man, Don is resistant to the concept of change, and is adamant that things stay the way they are.Īnd while on first (and second and third) glance, the buffoonish, desperate Michael Scott is nothing like the slick, old-fashioned-drinking womanizer Don Draper, they both represent the same thing: an opposition to change in a modernizing world that threatens to leave them behind. It’s 1966, and a crowd of people are marching in favor of equal opportunity in employment regardless of race. On Mad Men, Don Draper’s (Jon Hamm) birthday episode, “A Little Kiss,” comes at the beginning of Season 5. From Succession’s already-iconic luxury soirée from hell and The Office’s Michael Scott’s (Steve Carrell) big day that is overshadowed by a coworker’s cancer scare, to Mad Men’s uncomfortable surprise party and the three (three!) birthdays that stamp the sinister arc of Breaking Bad’s Walter White (Bryan Cranston), the birthday episode has the ability to affirm a show’s thematic material in a way that no other episode truly can. Given the weight they carry, it is unsurprising that many of TV’s beloved prestige comedies and dramas have important birthday episodes of their own. And more often than not, they’ll also reveal something unseemly and sinister about the world itself. Within these episodes, revelations are typically made about a characters’ descent into corruption, or their ruin via external forces. (I’m assuming I’m not the only one who physically recoiled at the news that tortured golden boy Kendall Roy was throwing himself a birthday bash in the newest season of Succession).
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Given all this, it only makes sense that episodes of TV shows that center around a birthday tend to be… intense. More than that, though, birthday parties are finite markers that locate a person in their own life. Often involving a culmination of the most important people in a person’s life, the event is naturally a treacherous hotspot where bubbling tensions finally boil over. Despite its surface appearance as a joyous if trite ritual, the birthday party has been known to cause a great deal of social and psychological headaches.
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