If you're at all familiar with NBC's hit series The Office, you no doubt remember Ryan Howard, the disaffected temp turned boss turned drug addict turned weird hipster temp again. His character went on quite the roller coaster of development over the show's nine seasons, but looking back, you may look at Ryan the temp in the first three seasons and wonder: How did this kid go so off the rails?
Well, if you want the show's answer, the logic goes like this: Ryan wanted success. He obtained that success pretty early, at the end of season three, when he got Jan's old job at corporate and became Michael's boss. Then, once he was at the top, he wanted to live the high life, and to him, the high life for a corporate executive in New York meant bars, clubs, girls, and, most importantly, drugs.
The show indicates that Ryan becomes addicted to cocaine (at the very least) during his time in New York, and his partying outside of work begins to affect his job performance - and so does his ego. When the Dunder Mifflin website, his pet project, begins going into a tailspin and experiencing problem after problem, rather than trying to fix the issues or admit that he needs help, Ryan begins telling salesmen to enter sales they made as sales made by the website. This lie eventually snowballs into all-out fraud, which ends with him getting arrested and dragged out of Dunder Mifflin's corporate office by the end of the season.
When Ryan starts again as a temp, he's like a new man - literally. He still has that typical Ryan sense of superiority, but about things he has no right to feel superior about, like his job at the bowling alley. He starts to identify with the fringe hipster crowd, because at least then he can feel like he's somehow still better than the people he works with. All the drugs he took probably also did quite a number on his brain, making him more easily susceptible to believing in crazy ideas like WUPHF.com his "Dream For A Wish" foundation.
And so Ryan went from one of the office's straight men, wielding his sense of reason and looks to camera like Jim and Pam, to just another kooky personality in the bunch...but why? Why did the writers decide that his character needed to take such a steep dive? The answer lies in The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s, a book by author Andy Greene in which he interviewed everyone behind the making of the show.
In the book, we find out that Ryan's New York high life character was actually the writers' way of poking fun at their new boss, Office producer Ben Silverman, who had the same scruffy beard and wore the same type of expensive suits. (Tina Fey admitted that Devon Banks, a character on 30 Rock, acted that way for the same purpose.) There was no animosity in this imitation, according to the book; just coworkers taking little jabs at each other.
Ryan going off the rails, though, had nothing to do with Ben Silverman. The reason for that is actually more practical, as writers Lee Eisenberg and Anthony Farrell attested:
"B.J. [the actor and writer who plays Ryan] is hilarious in the early episodes because his character doesn't want to be there, and he's always put-upon," Eisenberg explained. "It's hard to, every day, every episode, have a moment where that guy is just not psyched to be there. Writing for Ryan was hard until he became Ben Silverman."
"We wanted to take it even further than Ben had ever gone and just see if we can have this character...go through the wringer," Farrell added. "It was playtime for a lot of the writers... A lot of that was because it was just funny for us to watch him implode...and also, to give him a reason to crash so we can bring him back."
So there you have it: Ryan's character crashed because of ego, hubris, and drug abuse: But the real reason behind it was that he was, essentially, too much of a stick-in-the-mud. It makes sense: The office already had their straight men in Jim and Pam, but even those two had a reason to want to be there. Ben had too much potential to be willing to participate...so the writers had no choice but to have him rise and fall, so that he would at the very least have a reason to be in the office, and on the show.
