Every week in this space Grantland pop culture correspondent Andy Greenwald will run down the happenings and mishappenings in NBC’s Thursday comedy night done mostly right. (Note: The order reflects newsworthiness, not quality. Although occasionally the two just might overlap.)

1. The Office

How do you know when the spark is gone? For a romantic naif like Andy Bernard it’s pretty simple: You fall in love with someone else, drive to Tallahassee, share a few laughs, a couple sandwiches, and then crash a bachelorette party to tell your soon-to-be-ex the great/terrible news. But with a sitcom, it’s rarely that clear cut.

The Office has been a mess all season, but the last run of new episodes before a not-particularly-earned spring break were at least an interesting mess. The banishment of half the cast to the Florida panhandle enlivened the writers' room like nothing since the Michael Scott Paper Company, creating an arc that, while manic and bizarre, at least demonstrated the 8-year-old (that’s 150 in sitcom years) still had some fight left in it. The hot Southern sun brought out a strange sort of crazy in familiar characters — Stanley the rum head, Dwight the sympathetic psychopath — and there was a palpable charge that resulted from pushing such a well-established franchise to the bleeding edge of plausibility. It wasn’t good, necessarily. But it was something. After a stuttering, frustrating start to the season, it seemed possible that The Office had somehow survived the loss of its head.

There’s been enough hand-wringing about the fate of The Office around these parts of late to make the Scranton Strangler blush. Could the show break out of its paralyzing stasis? (Probably not.) Is spinning-off characters into ill-advised new sitcoms the only way to keep the fat and happy cast fat and happy? (Perhaps.) Would anyone ever follow Steve Carell’s lead and escape the sinkhole of ambition, hope, and Herr’s potato chips that is Dunder-Mifflin? As of yesterday, the answer to the latter question appears to be “yes.”