The Office: the review

No, no, we’re not going to talk about the relentlessly overhyped American knock-off, which airs sometime this week—we’re pro-Steve Carell around here and we’re still not going to watch it. (It’s amazing—we don’t watch commercials, due to TiVo, and still we’re aware of how hyped this show is.) Do yourself a favor: just watch the original in order.

We’d heard over and over (and over and over) again about how good this series “The Office” from the BBC was. We never caught it on BBC America, but Darin, looking around for a birthday present/Christmas present/Hanukkah present for himself, decided to pick up the DVD sets of the first and second series, which included the lauded Christmas episode. He started watching it back in December, when his parents were here. I didn’t watch it with him then.

He came to bed after watching the first few episodes. He had a look of shell-shock on his face. “How is the show, honey?” I chirped merrily.

He shook his head. “It’s…painful. Brilliant, but painful.”

Hmmm. I wasn’t interested enough to start watching then, despite his growing raves about how un-fucking-believably hilarious and brilliant it was. But he kept after me to watch.

So a week or so ago we started watching it together. After the first two episodes I said, “This is the most annoying show ever. You sure I need to keep watching?” After four episodes, I was definitely interested but still cringing. After six episodes (the first series), I kept my hands near my face, but I was watching.

“The Office,” for those of you out there who are even slower on the uptake than I am, is a “documentary” about an office of a paper company in Slough, England. The boss is David Brent (writer-creator Ricky Gervais), a smarmy, incompetent boss who just wants “to have a laugh” with the team. Tim (Martin Freeman, soon to be Arthur Dent) is the competent salesman. Gareth (Mackenzie Crook), the very strange “team leader” who talks in dark and sinister ways about his army training, is quite possibly the least socially competent person ever committed to celluloid. The receptionist Dawn (Lucy Davis) and Tim have a strong attraction to one another, but Dawn has a boyfriend/fianc&eacute.

There are no “jokes.” (Except for the godawful ones David Brent tells. At one point I started shouting at the TV: “Shut up! Shut! Up! Stop it!”) The dialogue is pretty much how people actually talk. There are long, awkward pauses. There are excruciatingly embarrassing scenes. Seriously, I don’t know how Ricky Gervais wrote this stuff, considering he was going to do it.

We finished the second series last night. And it’s brilliant. It’s unbelievable. There are two scenes in the final episode that completely broke my heart, one of which prompted me to say to Darin, “They’ll never do that on American television.” The scene is done completely without any sound—speaking, music, ambient. And you can’t quite see the characters involved either.

I am really looking forward to the Christmas special now.

You must see this show on the DVD, for the “behind the scenes” documentary on the Series 1 disc. They play up the “Ricky Gervais IS David Brent” angle a little too much, but there are a couple of things in there that are so funny, all Darin has to do to make me laugh hysterically is repeat a few of the key phrases. I really want to know if Merchant and Gervais are completely improvising during their discussion of “Brain Jail,” their next project.

The most amazing thing about this show is that it’s reminded me, forcibly, of people I haven’t thought of in over a decade. People I worked with at Apple, most of whose names I’ve forgotten. The chumminess and obnoxiousness and general insanity of an office job, even a really cushy one like we had.

I told Darin about one guy I worked with. Right after I started working there, a group of us were sitting around and the conversation turned to cocaine. (It was Apple. It was the late Eighties. Let me put it this way, it wasn’t an unlikely topic of conversation.) And I said, in my snarkily smug way, “Cocaine is God’s way of telling you you haven’t put enough money in your 401K.”

And this guy says, “Of course not! You’ve spent it all on cocaine!”

The silence that ensued, the embarrassment of the other people standing around (who were, to be fair, a lot smarter than this guy), I remember to this day.