John Krasinski as Jim Halpert in 'The Office.'
NBC

Jim Halpert (John Krasinski) looks a little nervous. Is it because The Office may be bringing on a baby?

Unless we are being treated to a massive dose of misdirection, which signs suggest that we are not, the sixth season of The Office will address, among other things, the fact that Pam is pregnant.

This could be very good news, or it could be very bad news.

The ups and downs of adding an infant, after the jump...

 

Very often, babies are bad for comedies. The logistics of working with them are complicated enough that you don't actually see the baby very much, so once it's born, it becomes a sort of oft-mentioned but little-seen mythical creature (witness Friends, where Emma was often "with her grandparents" at critical moments). And if nobody really has a sense of where the long-term experience of parenthood, as opposed to the short-term plot point of parenthood, is going, then you wind up with a baby who immediately ceases to be part of the show's world.

That, of course, is not to mention the fact that there are pregnancy and parenthood jokes that are so overdone that trying to find a new angle is like searching for a new way to make fun of airline food or losing a sock in the dryer. Changing diapers, ha ha! Up all night, ho ho! It's not that these things aren't compelling; it's that it's very, very well-covered territory.

The Office has a built-in advantage, of course, in that ... well, it's set in the office, meaning that not seeing the baby (or much of Jim and Pam's home life) won't be that unusual anyway. You don't see much of anyone's existence outside work, though there are regular field trips.

The biggest reason for optimism, however, is how unexpectedly touching the moment in the fifth-season finale turned out to be when Pam and Jim found out that she was pregnant. Done without dialogue, it was a great example of what we discussed last season: the show's growing ability to capitalize on long character arcs with major emotional payoffs. That romance progressed over five seasons — and not in the up, down, get together, break up, lather-rinse-repeat way that's so common on television, either.

It just took them five seasons to get from being pals to being parents.

The Office can be an uneven show: they've put out clunker episodes and even whole clunker segments of seasons. The chemistry is delicate; the tone can easily slip. There were fans who declared as soon as Pam got pregnant that the show was over, ruined, spoiled, "jumped the shark" (which is now very often fanspeak for "something happened that I don't like"), never to recover. There is a strong sentiment of "Babies, ptooey!" among fans of what still is, much of the time, cringe comedy.

Tonight, they'll get the first bits of evidence about whether their fears are well-founded.