This feels like an unintuitive comparison, but the reason I find Ernest Hemingway's short stories so incredibly rich is the same reason I think The Office has remained one of the most popular TV shows in America, and in my relatively uncontroversial opinion, one of the greatest TV shows ever created.
Ernest Hemingway was a writer of moments. Looking for any sort of linear plot in his short stories is more often than not a complete lost cause. But Hemingway's intent is almost never to walk the reader through a full narrative arc. Instead, he takes that narrative arc, chops it into individual scenes, plucks out the most emotionally interesting one, and leaves everything else on the cutting room floor. The resulting short stories — "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," "Indian Camp," and "Old Man at the Bridge" come to mind as good examples — are often just single glimpses into much larger stories, but that single glimpse, constructed with only simple, top-of-mind observations and almost unnaturally straight-forward language, always feels authentically and insanely human.
I think Hemingway captures what it actually feels like to be human better than any other writer I've ever come across because he fully acknowledges life does not play out in a series of linear narratives; it plays out in a collection of sharply felt moments, each insignificant when viewed in isolation but rich with meaning when considering what that moment could mean or reveal when placed in context. Heck, the moments of silence in Hemingway stories like "Hills Like White Elephants" and "The End of Something" reveal more about the characters than the moments of dialogue in many other authors' works. Every decision Hemingway makes as a writer is in service to capturing these moments as genuinely as possible.
It almost feels silly to analyze The Office with equally intense language, but I think the show is genius enough that it's warranted. Most people gravitate towards The Office because, quite honestly, the characters are lovable and the writing is hilarious. You don't really have to analyze it any further than that. Checking both of these boxes will qualify a sitcom as tolerable at worst and binge-able at best.
But The Office has cemented itself too deep into our culture for me to think its success is just a function of lovable characters and hilarious writing, and I think the third variable in play here ties back to what Hemingway mastered: the ability to authentically capture insanely human moments better than its peers. The moments I'm referring to rarely connect to the episode's story arc and rarely last for more than 15 seconds, but they always have a way of grounding the rest of the episode into something that feels more like reality.
For example, there's a moment in season two where Jim and Pam are at the store buying a present for Kevin, and Jim picks up fabric softener. A shocked Pam asks Jim whether or not he actually uses fabric softener, to which Jim replies he does, and Pam confirms she does too, and then they keep walking. The whole exchange lasts no more than maybe 10 seconds, and unsurprisingly this fabric softener conversation has no major implication on the outcome of the episode. But the tone of this conversation — the cheap thrill of learning something new about someone you love mixed with the awkwardness of needing to hide that excitement — is captured so beautifully and simply that, even if you have never shopped for fabric softener with your crush before, you're brought back to the same time you felt that nebulous mix of love and curiosity and excitement and awkwardness that the scene conveys. These snapshots are packed throughout the entire series, always delivering an extra jolt of sincerity into a show that can otherwise get rather crude or cringey at times.
The comparisons between Ernest Hemingway's short stories and The Office probably stop here, as I don't think Hemingway would ever create a character dense enough to burn his foot on a George Foreman grill, and I never got the impression that the Office writers had any interest in bull fighting. But I do think this shared ability between Hemingway's short stories and The Office in capturing short, insanely human moments in a way that feels uniquely authentic is the element that gives these works such impressive longevity, and I don't expect that authenticity to wear off any time soon.
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