Officetober: We Are All Andy Bernard
Explaining the arc that went from being unlikeable to likeable to unbearable.
Ed Helms probably has the most serious face in comedy. That is to say, he’s a really nice guy and Andy Bernard (aka the Nard Dog) was, for the bulk of The Office, harmless. It also reveals some volatile emotions that could involve losing control over one’s destiny, while simultaneously believing that you are still maintaining control. When I first watched Helms in The Hangover movies, we see him being browbeaten by others - an overzealous girlfriend, followed by an even more overprotective father-in-law - and often screams at people when things go wrong. It’s manic energy that doesn’t have a lot of dynamism among his Office peers but is very distinguishable whenever these circumstances arrive out of nowhere. It has the quality of making a character punchable, except once things happen for the worst, you become afraid for him.
It says a lot about a character when its trajectory is marked by a wall punch. He may not be the most unlikeable person in the series, but his arc throughout the show is definitely the most skull-crushing. When Andy came on to the scene to be more shallow and annoying than Dwight and Michael Scott. After that first punch to the wall, he then became more mellow and slightly less annoying. The most consistent thing about him is that he thinks big and fails. He makes big romantic gestures that are successful in the short term, like getting engaged with the rigid Angela Kinsey or impressing Erin with a party themed entirely after her. Long term, however, he is humiliated over misunderstandings and lack of self-awareness, like finding out that Angela had an affair with Dwight, or when Erin found out about his previous engagement with her. It’s a love-it-or-leave-it scenario that depends on the viewer’s tolerance towards the most famous Cornell graduate.
But Andy didn’t fail as a human being back then. Season 7 saw him with much more depth, once his vulnerabilities catch up on him. He fails at sales and shows that he’s playing catch up, and he does in the most Andy Bernard way possible: doing a seminar, with a little help from his friends. After breaking up with Erin, he moved on with another girlfriend. When Erin broke up with Gabe, Andy did not return back the favor. He also secured a relationship with one of the many clients that Michael Scott passed on to him, when Deangelo Vickers, the new regional manager, screwed it up in order to help him. Let’s also not forget, Daryl was one of his biggest chums and the chemistry between Craig Robinson and Helms adds a lot.
As he becomes the Regional Manager for the series’ remainder, seasons 8 through 9 saw Andy showing off his darker shades. Once Steve Carrell left, it turns out that leadership is sorely needed in a branch at Dunder Mifflin that everything is thrown at the wall to see if it sticks. Andy doesn’t have a lot of confidence in being a manager. Having been made a star thanks to The Hangover, Helms waste no time trying to win the audience’s heart, which is metaphorically speaking, the entirety of the Dunder Mifflin family. But he does come though by defending his colleagues in front of the new and unbearable Sabre boss Robert California, who made two cryptic lists containing their names.
The Office’s writers expand further on his character’s motivations. One that was most poignant was when he wants to impress his affluent parents at Dwight’s farm, who see him as a class traitor for working at a paper mill. Thus, throughout Season 8, we never see him attempt to assert his authority as a manager. Once Nellie Bertram, a Sabre executive introduced as someone whose only function is to fail upward and step foot into the Scranton branch, that changed him for the worse.
In “Angry Andy”, The Office exploited the character’s low temperament through a chain of deeply illogical events. The episode is hard to watch, yet feels like fair game. After years of romantically ignoring her, Andy impulsively goes on a road trip to pursue Erin, who abandoned a Florida project she was involved with to work for an elderly woman who treats her like a lost mother. But then, Nellie walks into his office and takes his job away; the interiors change and the staff is held, hostage. He returned and self-destructs in front of everyone: Erin, Nellie, the colleagues who can’t try to defend him, the new boss Robert California, and his disapproving dad on the phone. On paper, this should earn him a level of respect, but the character (and Helms) lack the dynamic and emotional range to accomplish this. Anything redeemable done by Andy - getting David Wallace to buy back Dunder Mifflin as it originally was or giving Nellie another chance - is offset by the cruelty from this past episode.
The final season drops the ball completely on Andy, mainly due to Ed Helms being absent to shoot The Hangover Part III. The list of narcissistic things Andy has done is endless: he bullied Nellie in revenge and managed to make her more likable than when she took his job. He abandoned Erin to go sailing to the Bahamas with his brother. Once he returned, he destroys a major sale made by Dwight. Andy eventually became disillusioned by his day job after watching himself in the finished documentary of Dunder Mifflin, that he is pursuing his dream of being famous. While everyone, including Andy, had a happy ending, it’s tempting to think that he had the most backhanded of all. It’s hard to understand how the writers can choose to mishandle a character who has been in the bulk of the show for years and flanderize someone into a category error.
Andy Bernard is a bizarro version of any other character. He’s bizarro Michael Scott; both men were Regional Managers at Dunder Mifflin (Andy was introduced as the Director in Charge of Sales at his previous Stamford branch), and try to get along with their inferiors, even if they don’t often return the favor back. Both started a paper company of their own after leaving their own branch. Both had terrible upbringings. Both made nemeses of specific individuals who wronged him. But where Michael shows to be pretty decent in sales, Andy was the worst-performing salesman in the branch. In the beginning, Andy was bizarro Dwight, as they both act incessantly loyal to Michael. The difference is that Dwight is not only great at his job, but he also matured over the course of the series. By the end, he was bizarro David Brent, as he tries to pursue a music career after becoming more disillusioned with the job.
Andy has a lot in common with Ryan Howard, particularly during the final two seasons. Ryan was a temp with an MBA, who promised himself to move away from Dunder Mifflin (and Michael Scott) as much as possible. Like Andy, Ryan was pretty lousy with sales and is far more self-centered with his ambitions. This comes to fruition once Ryan becomes a VP and crashed down with his pet project to transform Dunder Mifflin’s e-commerce site into a social media experience. Since then, Ryan is more disdainful being at Dunder, attempting to raise up a startup (and also failing) within whatever his role at The Office is. He becomes so unlikeable that Pam hates him more than Angela. Both men took their chances outside Dunder Mifflin and have failed big time. A horrible audition that was memed to death is a legacy for Andy, what being arrested for fraud from his own innovation was to Ryan. Unlike Ryan, he embraced and swallowed up what amounted to his fifteen minutes of fame, and quietly became an admissions officer at Cornell.
Another important similarity between Andy and Ryan is that both men had unstable office romances that are part and parcel with The Office. Ryan being with Kelly Kapoor was the best kind of toxic couple, mainly because BJ Novak and Mindy Kaling’s close friendship allows them to have great chemistry. Their passive-aggressiveness and neediness are made for each other, like a bickering couple out of a high school drama. Andy shares with Erin Hannon, the adorkable receptionist, a kinship in that they are at heart, middle schoolers. It’s a superficial on-again-off-again romance, and it is something that The Office does makes a good deconstruction out of, considering the many triangles and affairs that have turned out to be genuine connections.
From a developmental standpoint, it makes sense for Ryan to take the fall, as he embodies the millennial archetype whose ambitions are shattered by a lack of gratitude and humility. Novak, along with Mindy Kaling, left the final season, only having guest spots to pursue other projects. BJ Novak, who played Ryan, was in a similar situation as Ed Helms in Season 9, as he was absent for a couple of episodes during Season 5 to shoot Inglorious Basterds. We did not see him again until the Dream Team episode, where he has been working at a bowling alley and bleached his hair, lying to Kelly and telling her that he was going to Thailand when in reality, he was at Fort Lauderdale. That looked like a logical direction for Ryan, so why would Andy then be reduced to a raging narcissist? To make sure that the other characters look better in comparison? The final season yearns to make everyone end on a high note. Dwight ultimately becomes Scranton’s manager; he marries Angela, who was struggling to make ends meet. Jim and Pam had a long and happy marriage. Even Ryan was cut the slack, once he hooks up with Kelly again and abandoned his child.
The main difference is it’s actually fun to see Andy spiral out of control. After all, who doesn’t want to see the guy who has tormented Jim and his Stamford branch get his just desserts, revealing that Andy has a short temper? Throughout the show, Andy is a punchline of WASPy guys who come from privilege, so cocooned in his college days as an acapella ringleader. Whenever he hurts himself - the crotch split before Jim and Pam’s wedding, the cold open featuring amateur parkour, his showy romantic gestures gone wrong - we don’t mind if it happens because he is more interested in building his ego.
Once Michael Scott left, as The Office came to an end, it talked about its existence more. Who’s going to be in charge? Can Dunder Mifflin still be a company with no boss? By the end of the seventh season, they discussed who the leader should be and Andy mentions himself as a likable underdog, managing to get the role through bizarre circumstances. The meta-narrative of the show became more apparent in the final season, as soon as the documentary-style has ended. In essence, it’s about a cast with uncertainty about where they are going, much in the same way of employees facing possible redundancy when their employers merge with one another.
When Andy announces his departure, the staff begged him to stay, as if the writers try to make Helms stay around, to circumvent the filming of The Hangover Part III. They cast doubts over his abilities to make it, or at least, become more likable, and ultimately they were proven correct. A show-stopping rendition of I Will Remember You, and a line uttered by Helms (“I wish there was a way you knew about the good old days before you left them”) during the series finale felt like sticky tape that covers a wall filled with damaged asbestos. But it’s clear that Helms is talking about himself in The Office, a show that made him prominent, yet has nothing for him to do, when he was busy.
It’s difficult to have sympathy with Andy, but there are certain things that we can take for granted from him. There’s a sense that being a loser, whose baggage is too much to bear, is what a lot of people can empathize with. The majority of the characters are in arrested development, succumbing to the malaise of being an office drone. Andy is no exception to the norm, and while his sudden disillusionment is quite unnatural, his experiences being a normal cog of the Dunder Mifflin family is. Andy Bernard is a victim of many things. Of his creators, who reduced him into a bloviating egoist. From the sexual relationships that never blossom. Of his naturally-bred privileges that made him a conniving careerist from the beginning and a wannabe diva in the end. Those were the good old days, but we didn’t leave them. It was a smokescreen of warmth the entire time.