Office Wedding Draws Cheers, Tears, Few Jeers

(Newser) – Jim and Pam's wedding on The Office last night was a bit syrupy, but that's A-OK with most critics. And an ingenious twist made a YouTube gag bearable—even funny. Spoilers ahead:

• "Dunder Mifflin's golden couple managed to pull it off," Tanner Stranksy writes for Entertainment Weekly, and "in a completely dazzling and totally sweet fashion." The key? Not letting Michael's restaging of an infamous YouTube video upstage their nuptials—the second of the day, unbeknownst to the would-be thunder-stealer.

• "The thing I worried most about—that Michael would turn the wedding into a celebration of his own sad-little-clownistry—didn’t bring down the episode," writes Leonard Pierce of the Onion A.V. Club. "But the thing I worried least about—that the writers would fall into the trap of traditional sitcom wedding-episode tropes—did."
• The episode "underscored what The Office has done so well with Pam and Jim's relationship—keeping it special and affecting without letting it take over the show," writes James Poniewozik of Time. It may not have been the best episode, "but as a celebration, it felt perfectly right. Mazeltov."
• Michael Anthony, writing for TV Guide, is also verklempt. "Really, I don't know what I expected from the wedding, but it was what it was. In true Office fashion, the wedding was unapologetically what it was."