48. The Office (UK, 2001-2003)

by Robert Hornak

Weird to think, but in the late ’90s, Ricky Gervais was Stephen Merchant’s boss at the London radio station Xfm. In a prime example of life imitating future art, Gervais claims he lied to get his job as head of communications and needed someone around who actually knew what they were doing, and Merchant’s application was the first that looked reasonably good. “You’ve charmed me,” I can hear him saying to Merchant in the interview. The squat boss and his lanky assistant were fast friends, their bond being comedy… and comedic ambition. Later, Merchant made a short film for his BBC production course that featured a game Gervais as a sniveling, loutish boss. BBC saw it, commissioned a pilot, and The Office was born. Not a hit at first, it would eventually win BAFTAs and spin itself off into multiple international versions, including the American iteration, which barreled through nine successful seasons. Yet even after the world consumed it, then reconstituted it into its various images, the British original still stands as the greatest, purest examination of its themes, namely negotiating in realistic terms that critical gap between the tedium we must endure to sustain our lives and the relationships to be mined from the perfect strangers who populate that tedium.

The character Gervais created, David Brent, thinks his aggressive clowning will win him friends, and that the love pouring back will keep him in power. He desperately requires both, but his clowning is never funny and the power he desperately clings to is managing the sad little branch office of a paper merchant in stultifying Slough, and this makes him pathetic and the show brilliantly funny. Presented as a documentary of office life by a roving hand-held camera, sometimes acknowledged by the characters with a stray comment or a “did you see that” glance of disbelief, every episode is another deep-dive into the flop sweat of Brent’s grasping social freefalls, trying to maintain office morale and his own self-deluded popularity among the staff with weak impersonations of his comedy heroes, faltering jokes, and tone-deaf declarations of his own stalwart impartiality, a faux egalitarian plea that invariably slip-slides into bald-faced sexism and bigotry. Every single time, the gambit fails, like Wile E. Coyote running off the edge of a cliff and having nowhere to go but down.

The first image of the first episode is Brent clicking his pen, swiveling in his boss-man’s chair, eyeing a prospective new hire with his smugness at the eleventh notch, his unmitigated self-regard spilling out over the desk, and, on full peacock display, his total belief that everything he says is clever, entertaining, and original. But his every movement is easily discernable as a kind of shambling insecurity masked by unrepentant braggadocio, trying to impress this employee candidate he’s presumably never met by calling down to the warehouse to gift him with a forklift job just because he can, even as the hiree protests his inability to operate one. Brent’s blind spot is his own insouciant ridiculousness, so he can’t see that his desire to be a “friend first, boss second, probably entertainer third” is what forever lures him into traps set by self and ending always in another nadir moment of unrecoverable awkwardness. The series is one of the most consistent in spinning such unparalleled unease into pure cringing laughs.

The intensity of Brent’s forced humor and flights of sanctimonious observation, their purest doses coming in the single head-shot interviews, might eventually become unwatchable as a strict entertainment but for the neurotic balance guaranteed by the cogs in the Wernham Hogg machine. Every player in the two-season arc is perfectly cast, perfectly performed. The relationship between coworkers Tim (Martin Freeman) and Dawn (Lucy Davis) whose growing attraction is continually thwarted by Dawn’s beef-headed fiancé, Lee (Joel Beckett), is the more traditional heart of the show, and is for much of the first season essentially rationed out in glorified cutaways advanced as romantic progression, a sort of long-lens love story: a vérité exchange in passing at her reception desk, a quick look of knowing camaraderie in the midst of Brent’s verbal twattiness, or that particular bond that springs out of doubling up against a common office foe, namely Tim’s desk-area nemesis, Gareth (Mackenzie Crook). Together, Tim and Gareth wage a war across the front line that separates their two desks, Tim’s greatest weapon his overqualified sarcasm lobbed at any and all of leeringly earnest Gareth’s numb inanity – he of the English territorial army would, in his own mind, know best the ways of office political maneuvering, but that he, like Brent, is fully unaware of how his preening pseudo-knowledge spills out of him not with authority, but prattish fatuousness. Other odd but precise character types spackle the corners of the storylines, popping up with random regularity: Chris “Finchy” Finch (Ralph Ineson), an outside sales rep and Brent’s comic idol, who remains only spoken of for two full episodes so that when he finally appears we expect some Cleese-ian god to rain down laughs – but he’s just an insult-spitting bully pushing his way through everyone’s best patience, revealing yet deeper fissures in Brent’s judgment of character; Keith (Ewen MacIntosh), the finance operator, with his flat enunciations, lacking any and all care for his work, could be the poster boy for the office’s bereft spirit; Neil (Patrick Baladi) and Jennifer (Stirling Gallacher) are Brent’s longsuffering bosses – he of the casual charm and easy likability is Brent’s unwanted foil in the morale department, and she’s simply a woman, a fact under which Brent can only crumble beautifully. While each of these characters is treated as real people in their own right, they are ultimately types that place Brent’s undiminishing ego into high relief, bloating his very smallness into monumental proportions.

Gervais and Merchant, intent on forsaking typical sit-com pitfalls, built a generator of cringes and pathos in roughly equal measure, the first bleeding into the latter often enough that a sort of emotional rhythm is established quickly: the constant swing from our nervous anticipation of interpersonal disaster to a kind of helpless despair on his behalf. We’ve all known people like him, and on occasion we’ve accidentally been him, so his gauche interludes play somewhat inwardly to our own experience. But the identification never comes from any softening on the part of the writers or performers, a la the eventual softening of, say, Archie Bunker, nor is it the social etiquette pop-moralizing of Larry David, whose behavior on Curb Your Enthusiasm may be reprehensible in a social taboo sense, but is actually espousing things we’d love to say in the same unreasonably restrictive scenario. There’s a different kind of catharsis going on with Brent. He’s the sniveling child in all of us that wants desperately to be loved, or at the very least liked, but is without a jot of the requisite charm or social grace for easy interaction. He stumbles in where even the gamest person would be tentative on the approach. And we sense there may be no end-of-series emotional closure or validation because the writing, along with Gervais’ perfect performance, makes him even more selfish, even more bitter, especially in his interview segments, as the show goes along. By the arrival of The Office Special (a let’s-see-where-they-are-now follow-up to the two proper seasons), Brent is his most pathetic, his most unmoored from purpose, his most desperate and self-deluded. But still, miraculously, nervously, hilariously funny. That the final moments of the two-part addendum give him a slight glint of hope for real love from a true and gracious woman seems almost a cruel stroke when one recalls the twelve episodes’ worth of evidence that would prove this hope misguided at best.

In the scheme of it, it’s probably enough to simply enjoy watching Brent withering under the stare of those whose sense of decorum and humanity cannot abide his seething insecurities. But we also have to come to grips with the meaning of his existence: he might just be the representative man of our time, resisting age, maturity, and the responsibilities that go with it, flattering his own self-image with designs on the young man’s game of unfettered play, youthfully innate charm, unlimited future, easy romance… We may laugh at him, but boiled down to its psychological parts, this original and ultimate version of The Office presents a mean mirror to the unchecked emptiness that makes us all crave the acceptance of those around us. At our worst, yet discernably often, we are all David Brent.

[Gervais, without Merchant, attempted the lightning in a bottle thing in 2016 with the flaccid Netflix original, David Brent: Life on the Road, to not much fanfare, and with not much to recommend itself. But the original series’ influence can be felt in every show or movie since that utilizes the interviewed talking head, whenever it’s used for showcasing stunted emotional development or general comic punctuation – Parks and Recreation comes to mind – while the unsettling comedy of awkwardness can be traced most directly and in television to The Larry Sanders Show, then through this show, and can be felt in virtually all big-budget comedies up to and including today – the celebration of the ad-libbingly fumbling man-child. Unfortunately, after David Brent, it generally became a numbing trope that was pummeled and slain by Will Ferrell.]