Just (re-)watched all three seasons of “The Office”, Ricky Gervais’ and Stephen Merchant’s amazing comedy. The show is a mockumentary about a nondescript paper merchant in Slough, and it’s spot-on about the levels of jealousy that occur when the stakes are small, as they are in office politics - all these petite fiefdoms and petty jealousies and puffed-up self-important egos ruling over empires of cubicles and staplers. (Question: when Scott Adams - of Dilbert fame - watches “The Office”, does he feel a deep sense of being owned? Not that Dilbert is bad. But “The Office” is that good.)
“The Office” is strongly reminiscent of Christopher Guest’s classic mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap in that it undercuts the very people it purports to depict, except that “The Office” makes one a lot more uncomfortable. That discomfort is rooted in its office setting - anyone who’s worked in an office would have found moments in the show that hit a bit close to home. And therein lies its genius. “The Office” is painful enough to be funny, but not enough to revulse, a style of comedy of discomfort that’s really hard to achieve.
That painfulness comes from countering a lot of television comedy conventions: “The Office” derives much of its humour from awkward silences, particularly following yet another David Brent (Gervais) faux pas, and from actors glancing away instead of facing the camera. Which is why we never get the sense that these are actors inhibiting roles - their uncomfortable responses are what you’d expect from regular people: long pauses, comic mistiming.
The titular office is populated by Brent, the boss and self-styled entertainer (after his sacking, he releases a hilarious soft-focus music video of “If You Don’t Know Me By Now”); Gareth, the Territorial Army man who’s utterly devoid of irony or the ability to read sarcasm; Tim, the wry voice of knowing weariness (his droll rolling of eyes into the camera is a comedic treat); and Dawn, the receptionist who Tim clearly is in love with, but who has a jerk of a fiance. Other characters, notably Keith the dry accountant, round up the supporting cast, but the show focuses mostly on these four leads.
Much of the humour of “The Office” comes from the contrast between Brent’s image of himself as the ideal boss, and the pathetic leader he really is. Hence we see numerous self-aggrandising claims undercut by wry B-roll shots, and we have hilarious moments such as Brent singing his own composition (“Freelove Freeway”) at a motivational talk. Yet, as noted in the commentary, while Gervais’ blowhard character is the ostensible focus of the show, the relationship between Tim and Dawn (Lucy Davis) are the true heart of the show, driving its plot. Perhaps the classic example of this would be the last episode of season 2, where Tim rips off of the mike and runs in for one last chance to tell Dawn he loves her before she leaves for Florida and there’s pure silence, not even the background hum or whirr of the office machinery: breaking out of the knowing satire on the tedium of office life to a moment that actually means something.
And Brent, for all his Napoleonic tendencies, comes across as sympathetic in the end, showing that the very fact of viewing a man’s life on camera - even on a camera that is clearly being played to - can cause us to sympathise with him. (This phenomenon, of course, will be familiar to fans of “Curb Your Enthusiasm”.) Clearly Brent means well and wants to be a good leader, even if his own evaluation of his charm is far removed from reality, and even if his desire to be liked can cause him to do pathetic things (at one office party, he does a dance in order to one-up Neil, his more popular boss, but ends up looking like a deranged orang utan) or to lash out.
“The Office” is scrupulously uncompromising about the depressing nature of spending 8 hours a day under the harsh sterile flourescent lights of offices, and its satirical style may not be to everyone’s taste. But no less an assessor of comedy than David Letterman called it “possibly the greatest television programme of all time”, and from this vantage point it’s hard to disagree - if there’s one detracting thing, it’s that the show only has 14 episodes, counting the Christmas specials, but they are 14 perfectly-crafted episodes.