The Office Vs. The Office

[Brian Damage]

The American version of "The Office" began its first season in March 2005 on NBC with just six struggling episodes inevitably shadowed by memories of the remarkable -- and remarkably popular -- British original created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. The popularity of that first "Office" both in the U.K. and the U.S. (it aired on BBC America) is noteworthy above all because its vision was so relentlessly bleak, its exquisite parody of every ghastly affectation known to our age so knowing and so implacable. That parody is the heart of the David Brent character (Mr. Gervais). Not only was the show's portrait of this middle manager of the (fictional) Werner-Hogg paper company bleak, so was its portrait of most of the office staff and, indeed, all life in Slough generally -- a place already reviled by the British poet John Betjeman in his 1937 poem of the same name, written in a fit of anti-industrial fervor. "Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!" the first line implores.


Photofest
Ricky Gervais in the British 'The Office.'
In that British "Office," subjects like job loss and threats thereof were built into those sendups of the boss, David Brent. In one scene, an angry employee who was just informed by a smoothly philosophical David that he has been made redundant isn't buying the vague, luck-of-the-draw reason given. He demands to know whether another employee was favored to keep his job because he happened to be a dwarf. An insane colloquy follows, led by David and his chief toady, Gareth (Mackenzie Crook), on the physical difference between dwarfs and midgets and, possibly, elves -- till the employee walks away.

Virtually every spoof and comic turn in this "Office" has an edge of darkness, but nowhere is the dark deeper than in the tone of another scene about employment fears. In this one the staffers await David's return from a higher management meeting with the answers he promised about their job status. They need to know now, a staff member insists, when David finally comes back. What they hear is in fact bad news -- namely that many of them will lose their jobs. But there is also good news, David tells the stricken staff, which has the look of people about to lose everything -- no joke about it. And that news, a beaming David informs the gathering, is that he himself has been promoted.

"Satire is what closes Saturday night," said a long-ago wit, writing about audience tastes in the theater. Not this TV satire, so well loved however bleak, and built so unyieldingly -- and brilliantly -- around a character incapable of exciting the smallest shred of human sympathy.

That said, the American "Office" (developed by Greg Daniels) is, in its vitality, something of a miracle itself, with an ensemble cast that has, this season, reached its peak. Whether in the jobs fair episode where the preening branch manager Michael Scott (Steve Carell) can find no one interested in working for the Dunder Mifflin paper company, or the one in which Michael -- refusing all acknowledgment that his angry employee, Stanley, has openly dissed him -- insists that Stanley is a "beautiful sassy black man" and a good friend, or the spectacular finale, it has been clear that this "Office" has been producing at high levels.


NBC
Steve Carell in the U.S. version.
The tone has, from the beginning, borne small resemblance to that of its British progenitor. Scranton, Pa., home of Michael's Dunder Mifflin branch, isn't the kind of place that would inspire calls for friendly bombs. All that's wrong with it, you can occasionally divine from the terminally envious manager, is that it offers no high life or New York-style sushi (as he calls the sushi available in Manhattan).

This "Office" -- loaded with honors, its fan base by now immense -- has worked its way into a satiric mode that's at once flinty and soft-hearted. It's a combination perfectly jelled in the character of Michael, a believer in every new fashion and all the worst that has been thought and said in our own or any other times. Also a boaster and narcissist of the first order -- needy, tone-deaf, pathologically suggestive, and still a sympathetic sort often enough. Which doesn't make him any less infuriating. Mr. Carell juggles all of this with sublime ease, or so he makes it appear -- no small trick.

Abetting Michael is Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson), a lackey more credible, in his unearthly way, than Gareth, his British counterpart -- and now a significant name on the American scene. Not for nothing did John McCain answer "Dwight Schrute" -- one of the candidate's better jokes -- when he was asked who his vice presidential pick might be.

In the Scranton office, mass job losses don't seriously threaten, love can blossom unexpectedly for unlikely couples -- as it did between the remarkable Dwight and the upright and dour, bordering-on-vicious Angela (Angela Kinsey) -- and then go wrong as it invariably does. The worst that happens to the Dunder Mifflin crew are things like being made to work Saturday because of some piece of bureaucratic idiocy, or having to endure one of Michael's lectures on advancing tolerance and equality. That, and its like, is suffering quite bad enough, or so the Dunder Mifflin crowd manages, so beautifully, to persuade us week after week.



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