The Office US

Not being funny, but this blog is kind of a big deal in America.  Well, sort of.  The US is actually the biggest audience for my self-indulgent, mistyped ramblings that loosely relate to a series of obscure (mostly) British boxsets.  It’s more or less neck and neck with the UK, but the nation with the blonde-haired mess as a leader has pipped the other to the post.  What?  Oh.  Meanwhile, in third place, we have the Ukraine, so maybe it’s click farms and chatbots driving my numbers after all.  Either way, it’s gratifying to us, the internationally insignificant Brits, when some of our culture is taken on across the Atlantic by a bigger boy.  The Office remains the standard by which we measure all subsequent UK sitcoms and I think about it most days.  Partly because I work in an office and, after a decade of doing such, am slowly turning into David Brent (I did no [sic] get an agenda), but also due to its artistic merit.  It captured everything about the banality of working life yet made it hilarious as a result of its everyday tedium.  It found its own global audience but could go after even broader appeal translating itself into versions for other markets: The Office US was born.

Thanks to our inferiority complex (get over the empire, guys) the Brits sneered at the dumbing down of our sophisticated humour for great unwashed audiences of Yanks.  It was with that same curiosity that I inspected the first season.  A near blow-by-blow replica of the UK programme, the show makes a few swaps (cue Scranton for Slough, Dunder Mifflin for Wernham Hogg) and therefore it plays out almost the same content with different accents.  Even the layout of the actual office looks like an exact replica.  For some reason, it didn’t work for me.  Years later, I noticed a dear friend in the office spending his lunchtimes watching episode after episode.  “It’s quite good actually,” he said in his Blackpool brogue.  Again, I scoffed.  Anyone who could spend their lunch hour at leisure clearly wasn’t busy enough, as the only acceptable behaviour is to shovel food into your unwitting mouth while trying to clear emails, inevitably losing substantial quantities of foodstuffs in the cracks of your keyboard.  But, earlier this year, I needed a new comedy show to play now that I had finished South Park.  There, deep in my Amazon Prime browser, stood The Office US.  No pressure, just there.  I decided to give it another go, just in case it was “quite good actually.”

And without further preamble, I can confirm that it is definitely quite good.  While the first season feels straightjacketed by its UK progenitor, and the second wobbles a bit in places as the stabilisers come fully off and it feels all billy-big-bollocks about striking out on its own, The Office US soon develops into some of the most delicious sitcomery anyone can hope to find in their TV on demand platform.  My first shock was that the whole US thing ran for nine seasons, many of which were at the full length of over 22 episodes.  When we British aren’t scoffing at others, we’re busy making hardly any instalments of our favourite TV shows.  I wondered how I would ever get through it all.  But my strategy was well honed: four episodes could be nailed during Sunday-night food prep, another each night over dinners at home, and at least two in my weekly bath (please note I shower in between, but the bath is with special salts as I am a highly tuned athlete).  The programme became a close companion and constant life partner.  And here’s what it offers:

Great lead characters

Along with David, it’s hard to imagine success without Tim, Dawn and Gareth.  But their US iterations, especially with longer to develop, easily become just as beloved.  While Michael Scott’s constant stream of attention-seeking irritates just as deeply, there’s an innocent charm to Steve Carell’s portrayal that makes you root for him more than you’d expect.  Pam and Jim embody a true love story but with the added subversion of their competitive pranking preventing things from ever being too saccharine.  And the target of their pranks, Dwight Schrute, is mined endlessly for the butts of jokes.  Rainn Wilson clearly revels in his awkward, human-hating lines, but also lives for shouting aloud the various German Schrutisms that delight the linguist in me.  These four form an awesome core…

Great supporting characters

…but it’s those we could dismiss as the peripheral characters that multiply The Office US’s charm beyond anyone’s expectations.  With each episode, my favourite changed, from Phyllis’s wonderful understatement, to Meredith’s hard-partying approach (and disastrous approach to casual Friday).  Creed often rose to the top with his abstract asides, looking more surprised than anyone still to be in a job, and I could never get enough of Toby whining nor of Darryl trolling his colleagues.  But it’s in the accountants’ corner that my heart truly lies.  Kevin, perhaps the first to become a caricature of himself as the seasons rolled on, is a joyful creation (enough for Holly to assume he has special needs) and his response to Baby Philip is pitched perfectly.  To his right, Oscar enjoys feeling superior to his colleagues while they blunder from faux pas about his sexuality to faux pas about his Latino heritage, while, opposite, Angela loudly disapproves of everything while worshipping her cats.  As Oscar and Angela’s storylines develop, they end up locked in embittered rivalries that alternate with moments of being there for each other: such apt office conflict.

Silliness

I’ve been clear on this blog many times before (see post on Miranda) but silliness in a boring office is crucial to survival.  Here, we have an absolute excess of silliness to feast upon.  Sometimes straying beyond realistic mockumentary into played-for-laughs buffoonery, The Office US is as comfortable with ridiculous dialogue as it is with pure slapstick.  I first realised this during the notorious fire drill episode (Stress Relief), containing a never-ending sequence of sillier and sillier moments of physical comedy (until a cat and then Oscar fall through the ceiling tiles).  I laughed for days.  There’s also an excellent parkour moment with Andy and a cardboard box whose genius is matched only by its fleetingness.

Lifelong friends

As the show draws to its end, it reiterates an emphasis on friendship.  Just as you can’t choose your family, you can’t choose your colleagues.  Well, in fact, you can, just leave and work somewhere else.  But what they mean is that you end up spending all day everyday (apart from weekends) with a bunch of strangers, and you end up sharing so much of your lives that they become dear friends.  It can’t be helped.  Even Stanley, who never finds his co-workers anything other than irritating or funny to laugh at (not with) finds a moment of poignancy.  The final seasons, coping well enough with a lack of Michael Scott, begin to investigate how the employees of Dunder Mifflin will cope when the documentary they’ve spent nine years making finally airs.  While the mockumentary trope is sometimes stretched pretty thin as the action plays out, it does help things turn meta as the cast consider themselves on camera and reflect on the time they have passed together.

Like Parks & Recreation (which is very similar and I have no way of checking which came first but instead I will just love both), finally finishing The Office US was a bittersweet moment.  These characters had become my real-life friends, and their absence would leave a space in my life.  I suppose I better talk to my real colleagues again, then.  They’re quite good actually.

Extras

Part of coming to terms with adult life is realising that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.  The most interesting Facebook post I’ve seen in recent times (yes, I still seem to be on Facebook) was a friend asking for tips about how to stack Tuppaware in a dishwasher.  There is probably nothing more banal, and yet the engagement rates were high.  This is, after all, adulting.  Luckily, I’m already really good at stacking Tuppaware in a dishwasher (it’s all in the angle and the anchoring), but this did cause me to reflect on the stage of adulthood I am finally reaching.  2018’s sole goal is to buy a home.  After twelve years of professional flat sharing, I might finally be able to lounge around watching boxsets in my underpants like some sort of hairy, sofa-based mammal without people wrinkling their noses at me (unless the neighbours can see in through the windows of any new place I buy).  This has meant that adverts on TV that just seemed like total white noise before have become endowed with a new significance.  Take DFS.  I’ve never thought about buying a sofa before, but I do know there’s always a sale on and you don’t have to pay anything for six years or something.  And also 0% finance.  I don’t really know what that is, but it’s very important and lots of adverts say it.  I might start offering 0% finance on me as a person and see if that makes me more popular.  It’s got to be better than consuming boxsets in my underpants.  Suddenly, DFS ads started to capture my attention in a new way.  And then the voiceover sounded familiar.  And then I realised it was Ashley Jensen.  And then this reminded me of what a delight she was in Extras.  And now here I am writing another of these blog posts about it.  Shall we?

We probably all remember the huge fuss that ensued when Ricky Gervais was faced with topping the genre-redefining comedic achievements of The Office.  Extras was different in two ways: moving away from the mockumentary structure and reflecting Gervais’s propulsion to the A-list with cameos from some of Hollywood’s biggest household names.  And Barry from Eastenders.

Extras follows Andy Millman, an absolute everyman stuck working as a background artist while dreaming of getting his own sitcom off the ground.  The various film sets that form his workplaces offer a new setting for each episode and a supporting cast that replenishes itself throughout.  Facing the daily prospect of unflattering costumes and waiting around all day doing nothing alongside Andy is best friend, Maggie (played by Ashley Jensen, hence the banging on about her in this week’s tedious and irrelevant opener).  Together, they both end up confronted by the whole gamut of awkward social faux-pas, from casual racism, to homosexuality, via treatment of the disabled, and everything else, including genocide, but that’s a bit more than a faux-pas.  In this respect, Extras has dated itself slightly, as our views on so many of these things are far more woke than they were in 2005.

Where the humour still shines through is the ridiculous moments that Maggie and Andy’s naivety and haplessness thrusts them into.  I would now like to run through some of my favourites:

Custard

In the Les Dennis episode, Andy has a role in a pantomime alongside the fallen-from-glory TV personality.  On choreography is Bunny, an overbearing stage father whose adult daughter, Lizzie, is making up the chorus.  Maggie, who happens to be an old school friend, is reluctantly reunited with Lizzie and ends up invited to Lizzie’s very depressing birthday party (hilarious in itself).  She somehow ends up singing Food Glorious Food, but Bunny chimes in over and over to make sure she hits the right notes for custard.  I have since never been able to hear the name of this vanilla dessert sauce without his voice going right through me.

Patrick Stewart’s face

The famous cameo appearances all involve a real person playing an awful version of themselves.  In Extras, Patrick Stewart is only interested in situations that involve a lady’s clothes falling off and, despite her scrabbling around to get dressed, he’s already seen everything.  He recounts these scenes with deadpan earnestness and then, once finished, his little face glazes over, terribly pleased with itself, so that you’ll never see him in the same light again.

Prophylactic or sheath

In series two, Andy lands a gig on an epic fantasy movie, starring a bratty Daniel Radcliffe.  Apparently only just reaching sexual maturity, Radcliffe tries to chat up Maggie in the catering bus, revealing he already has an unravelled condom ready to go.  He then accidentally flicks this and it lands on Dame Diana Rigg’s head.  Her withering expression goes to show why she totally nailed the role of Queen of Thorns years later in Game of Thrones.

Pug pug

As the story unfolds, Millman’s sitcom gets picked up, goes into production and finally airs, despite ending up a million miles away from the original vision.  Millman gets access to VIP treatment in a bar, and ends up rubbing shoulders with David Bowie, who in turn takes to the piano and composes an on-the-spot ditty about this silly little fat man.  Cue the rest of the bar’s patrons joining in with the refrain.

Darren Lamb

Don’t worry, Stephen Merchant is here as well everyone.  He plays Millman’s atrocious agent, barely aware of the name of his client’s sitcom (When The Whistle Blows) and always clad in a naff dad coat that looks wrong wherever he goes.  Their exchanges in his office have consistently guaranteed me a hearty LOL.

The sparkling water bottle

In the Sir Ian McKellen episode, Millman apes a visiting old school friend’s chat-up technique, without realising what’s in the bottle he has just been chucking about with affected nonchalance.  It’s worth watching all of Extras just to see his puffy cheeks and bulging eyes when he realises the terrible mistake he has made.

But what’s the point of all these highlights?  They all show us that adult life is hard, because you have to grow up into your own disappointments.  It’s a series of excruciating moments surrounded by awful people.  So, maybe you expected that, by now, your hit sitcom would be enjoying rave reviews, but you’re actually using social media to scoff at other people’s approaches to stacking Tuppaware in a dishwasher.  Extras may have some dated humour and deviate from real life with its ready availability of acting royalty, but as an exercise in expectation management, it really hasn’t aged a bit.

The Office

“I couldn’t watch it because my dad wanted to watch The Office.”  It was 2002.  I remember it exactly.  I had asked a friend whether they had seen something on TV, something that was essential viewing in those days (though I can’t remember at all what it was now).  We were on our way to Scouts, because that was a perfectly acceptable thing to be doing at the age of 17 in Surrey.  “Well”, I thought to myself, “what a parent-y and adult-y thing to want to watch.  I’ll never be like that.”

Sixteen years later, I’m writing a blogpost about why The Office is one of the most significant works of comedy I have ever seen.  I may not be a parent, but I’m definitely an adult.  Last week I asked someone to let me finish a cup of tea before I would do anything else.  I think about coffee a lot of the time.  I wake naturally just after 5am.  These are all things I never thought would happen to me.  The other thing I failed to consider becoming a part of my everyday life, but which has in fact defined it for the last eleven years, is office work.  So let’s begin this discourse by acknowledging the irony.  Not only am I unable to remember the other show I loved so much when I was younger, while scoffing at grown-ups watching boring programmes about their places of work, but I have self-fulfilled the prophecy: my adult life has been spent as an office drone.

I eventually first watched The Office while still in education.  Too many friends were quoting it to me for me to be able to bear missing out.  It portrayed an alien world, mostly because full-time working life is so much worse than school.  I remember afternoons dragging till the bell went at 3.30pm, but now I’m rooted to a desk till 5.30pm at the earliest.  School terms were punctuated by lengthy holidays, but time off as an adult comes in the form of just a handful of weeks.  Unless punished with detention, school enforced breaks and full lunch hours.  I now shove food in my face while trying to stay on top of emails (occasionally carving out time to write this stupid blog).  So now, that alien world is my life, but it’s actually made each subsequent re-watching of The Office all the more artful in how it captures what we are sadly destined to become, as our schoolchild dreams slowly die one by one.

And this is exactly what happens to two of the main characters in the show.  Dawn has given up on becoming an illustrator and Tim has forgotten that he was going to do something else besides sell paper.  The Office celebrates so much that is familiar about British workplaces: the cheap shirts tucked badly into a pair of itchy smart trousers, being at your desk while it’s dark outside (half the year, roughly), not knowing where the line lies between banter and offence.  But then it champions the human spirit in spite of the fate that befalls millions of us (and I recognise that there are worse fates than earning your crust in an industrial park.  You could be murdered, for example).  Over the two series and the Christmas special, the chemistry between Tim and Dawn builds with brutal realism, carving out potentially the most real-life love story I have ever seen (as I mentioned when talking about Geordie Shore).  Their final moment at the office party to the sounds of Alison Moyet’s Only You (a song associated with enduring my dad’s poor music taste while he taxied me around) is a vital moment of hope that takes place between photocopiers and computer monitors.

Let’s move on from this emotional depth with some rape jokes.  Never really appropriate, I suppose, but this reference, from the series one episode, Training, still makes me smile.  Not because it trivialises an unforgiveable crime, but because of all the circumstances that lead to it.  But this is exactly the legacy of The Office.  Get the tone wrong at work (quoting a joke from the office that uses rape as a comedic device) and you enter into gaff territory, becoming your very own David Brent.  I freely admit to Brenting out all over the show with my teams in the office.  I do this so much, I have to own the situation by irreverently claiming to be a “chilled-out entertainer” while hoping nobody notices.  I never got the goatee beard, but the topknot that lasted two years came pretty close.  Oh well.

What else can I add to all the appreciation out there already for The Office?  Not much.  But I do want to dissect the mockumentary style some more, as this really enabled the banality of the show’s subject matter to be cast in a new light.  Characters were given pieces to camera, enabling them to dig even deeper holes.  They could also make eyes and faces at the audience at any point, joining us in on the jokes all the more closely, or making us aware of the artificiality of the situation, as embodied by the handyman that just stops in his tracks at the sight of the cameras.  Best of all are the interstitial shots that chop up each episode.  We see paper sheets going through the copier feed.  We see workers staring into space at their desks.  We see a whole load of nothing happening.

But somehow, it’s this nothingness that makes The Office all the more cherishable.  Its very scarcity, at least in the UK version, is its strength, as we will always want more than we will ever be given.  The perfect volume of things happen, because office life is characterised by its monotony.  The show’s style has seen its influence spread far and wide, with shows like Parks & Recreation.  It changed the game for what a comedy expects from an intelligent audience and, sixteen years later, I’m still talking about it.