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.