The end of The Office: The 6 best tributes

Situation comedy is almost always about family, whether or not the characters are related: "A lot of these people, this is the only family they have," Michael says in an early episode, showing the camera a mug that reads "World's Best Boss." "So, as far as I'm concerned, this says 'World's Best Dad.'"

You can think of it as a sort of popular-art "Waiting for Godot," in which the characters irritate and entertain one another to pass their blurring days. They pull pranks, play games, plan parties and throw parties. ("When do people work?" Phyllis is asked. ""We find little times during the day," she responds.) But in this kind of comedy, there is also the possibility for change, for advancement, for meaning, for love.

Love. It's one of the things we come to TV for: Not only for the love one character might bear another within an ongoing fiction, but for the perceptible love between the real people who play them. [Los Angeles Times]

Embrace your Inner Lunatic. Hey, it’s OK, plenty of executives already do, so why shouldn’t you? It actually works pretty well, keeps employees off balance, uncertain, on their toes. Effective control comes in many forms. [Forbes]

How did this possibly work? How did a show about an oblivious clod who had to buy himself a World's Greatest Boss mug — because none of his actual employees would ever think to do it — become a hit? How did a show with so many combustible, seemingly mismatched elements, become one of the best, most influential comedies of the 21st century?

The answer begins with two words: [writer] Greg Daniels.

Daniels is a smart, gifted writer, and one who can adapt when things aren't working. The pilot's bad because Carell is not [Ricky] Gervais, and therefore Michael Scott shouldn't have been David Brent — even though both men shared common attributes (and hit it off famously when Gervais cameo'ed late in Carell's run) — and even before The 40-Year-Old Virgin was released (which helped the writers, and also drove viewers to find the series and its suddenly popular star), Daniels and his team began adapting the show to fit its star and country. The episode immediately after the pilot, "Diversity Day" — in which Michael gets in trouble for wanting to perform the Chris Rock routine about the difference between black people and, um, other black people — remains one of the show's funniest, most representative episodes. The Michael Scott in it is still a pretty insufferable character, but there's now a context for him. And the Jim subplot — where he loses his biggest sale of the year but judges the day a success because Pam fell asleep on his shoulder during a long meeting in the conference room — also set a template for how the show could advance that storyline with minimal screen time and the tiniest of baby steps. [HitFix]

"In retrospect, we really over-shot this thing by an enormous margin," said Sheffield, adding that he likely had more than enough good material after filming a British workplace from 2001 to 2003. "We would have finished much earlier if one employee or another didn't insist on being interviewed every three minutes. And I have no idea why we were invited to Jim and Pam's wedding. All of that stuff is totally unusable." [The Onion]