The problem with last night's much-hyped Jim and Pam wedding on NBC's The Office (the network hasn't abandoned comedy yet the way it's abandoning drama) was that the show has always pulled in two directions, and they demanded different things.

On the one hand, the show is a silly, jokey, often uncomfortable salute to the kind of awkward weirdos you encounter at work, and the focus has remained on the ensemble. For that story, their wedding needed to be crashed by their co-workers who would do something exactly not-right and yet weirdly endearing. On the other hand, this particular romantic story has been handled as a little island of normalcy and very carefully protected from losing its actual emotional heft. (See the proposal, above.) For that story, their wedding needed to be personal and serious.

What to do, what to do.

What they did, after the jump.

 

After a lot of oddball setbacks, the show closed by cutting back and forth between two endings. Jim and Pam had previously sneaked out of the church in dismay over how crazy everything was getting, and they appeared again without any indication of what they did. But as their church ceremony proceeded, we flashed back to their trip out on the Maid Of The Mist boat at Niagara Falls to be "married" by the captain. (No, that's probably not legal. Settle down.)

And that was cut together with their church wedding, which their colleagues vandalized in precisely the way they would be expected to, by reenacting the famous YouTube wedding dance video to Chris Brown's "Forever."

The result was that on the one hand, their private wedding was the one you would want them to have for themselves, while the silliness of their co-workers (come on, Stanley was dancing!) was both joyful AND stupid, both loving AND incredibly inappropriate, which made it just right for the show.

I'd be curious to hear how other people reacted, but I thought it was a very inventive solution to the problem. Other shows (including How I Met Your Mother) have done the story where the couple sneaked out of their meaningless big wedding for a small private wedding, but this was quite different: here, they were both special. They kind of both needed to be there, for the show. I wouldn't have wanted Jim and Pam to have nothing to remember except "Forever," but I wouldn't have wanted to miss Michael's tearing-up smile, either.