The irrepressible David Brent (Ricky Gervais)
The Office versus The Office
Essay by Fritz Esker
I first discovered BBC’s The Office in the fall of 2003. Almost immediately, I fell in love with it. Not only was it hilarious, it just seemed so…real in a way that most television shows did not. It is one of my favorite television shows of all time. Shortly after The Office’s creators Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant called it quits after only two seasons (of six episodes each), NBC announced that it would air an American version of the show. At the time, it seemed painfully apparent to everyone except those at NBC that this endeavor would take its place alongside New Coke and the Knicks hiring Isiah Thomas as GM in the all-time pantheon of bad ideas.
When the show appeared as a midseason replacement in early 2005, I tried to pretend it didn’t exist. However, when staying with friends in Austin after the Hurricane Katrina/U.S. Army Corps of Engineers-induced chaos in August/Sept. 2005, I was exposed to one episode of the American version. Even though my moods were generally black at the time, I found it passable (which, in retrospect, is a small miracle considering how angry I was on a daily basis then). For a short time, I forgot about the show. Then, in the first few months after I returned to New Orleans, I started to hear from people that the American version was actually very good. Still, I only became a regular viewer of the American The Office by chance. A friend convinced me I should watch My Name Is Earl (a funny show), which airs before The Office on Thursdays. When watching My Name Is Earl one night, I was too lazy to change the channel afterwards and ended up catching The Office again. Shortly thereafter, I was hooked. Considering 24 seemed to jump the shark last year and Lost became wildly erratic in its second season, I’d go as far to say that the American The Office is now my favorite show on television.
But does it measure up to the British version??? That, dear readers, is what I will attempt to explore in this long, self-indulgent essay. First, I will start with a brief list showing the most important characters from the British version and their American equivalents.
Michael Scott (Steve Carell) and the American "Office" crew
British Version_______________________American Version
David Brent (Ricky Gervais)..........................Michael Scott (Steve Carell)
Tim Canterbury (Martin Freeman)................Jim Halpert (John Krasinski)
Dawn Tinsley (Lucy Davis)............................Pam Beesley (Jenna Fischer)
Gareth Keenan (Mackenzie Crook)................Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson)
Lee (Joel Beckett).........................................Roy (David Denman)
Warning: Spoilers to both versions of the show will soon appear!
While both versions of the show are ensemble pieces, the center of both offices is the boss character (David Brent in the British version, Michael Scott in the American version). Both men are the kind of guys who think they’re funny when they’re really, really not. Both men are the kind of guys who try way too hard to be cool and make friends. Both men are more concerned with making friends than being a real boss, and, as a result, neither are very good at what they do.
The dominant relationship in both versions is that of the office’s apathetic, but smart and funny salesman (Tim Canterbury in the British version, Jim Halpert in the American version) and the sweet but engaged receptionist (Dawn in the British version, Pam in the American version). Tim/Jim coast at their job. Both could probably do a lot better in the world, but are comfortable in their boredom. Tim/Jim is hopelessly in love with Dawn/Pam. In both versions, the receptionist is engaged to a man who works in the company warehouse (Lee in the British version, Roy in the American version). The other major character is Gareth/Dwight, the office Nazi who enforces meaningless rules and endlessly sucks up to David/Michael.
The show’s hero is Tim/Jim. He is smart, funny, and seems to be a generally good guy. However, in the British show, Tim is made out to be more of a loser than his American counterpart. Tim is 30, a university dropout, still lives with his parents, and works at a job where he has no interest in advancement. He has a hard time bringing himself to take risks, be it going back to school, trying to find a better job, or telling Dawn about his true feelings. He likens it to rolling dice, saying that he may have rolled a three, and if he tries to roll again, he may roll a seven, but then again, he may roll a one. In the American show, Jim is a little more well-adjusted. He lives with a roommate, as opposed to his parents. While he acknowledges that he is in a dead-end job and seems to lack any plans on how to get out of it, he generally does not seem as paralyzed by fear as Tim does.
Now, where to begin with the deeper comparisons? Let’s start with tone. The Office, in its British incarnation, is so funny that, on first viewing, it is easy to overlook how relentlessly bleak it gets. Just consider how the second season ended. David Brent was fired for incompetence and resorted to tearfully begging his superiors to let him stay. Most heartbreaking of all is the resolution to the Tim/Dawn relationship. Dawn is set to move to the United States with Lee. Tim, after confessing to the camera (both shows are fake documentaries) that he cannot change the current circumstances, takes off his microphone, and confidently strides to Dawn. We never hear what they say. We see them hug, then see Tim go back to his desk, where he puts on his microphone and simply says, “She said no, by the way.” For a comedy to end this way is extremely brave, even if it is relentlessly depressing. Granted, a two part Christmas special occurs, taking place 3 years after the second season ends. In these final two episodes, the characters are given more hopeful fates. However, in keeping with the show’s realism, the victories feel genuine and earned.
Even though things are often quite bleak in The Office, the show is always humanistic in nature and is never too ugly or mean towards its characters. This is best exemplified in the Christmas special. David, who was fired years ago, continues to show up at the office to chat and hang around with the workers, even though many of them couldn’t care less about his presence. When he is finally told by the boss, Neil (Patrick Baladi), that his visits are unwelcome, he tells everyone to give him a call if they ever want to meet up or have a drink. One worker says, “No one wants to meet with you. No wants to have a drink with you.” After a brief silence where David lets this sink in, Tim says, “I’ll have a drink with you.” At no point in the seasons did Tim and David ever seem close, but the scene shows that while David is often incredibly annoying, he is still a human being. People like David Brent are often irritating and difficult to deal with, but “normal” people are often needlessly cruel when interacting with the David Brents of the world. The easy way to deal with the situation would have been to let the insult stand, but instead of letting David leave feeling like he was despised, Tim volunteered to do something he probably did not want to do. It is a very brief scene, but one that encapsulates both the humanism and the pain/loneliness at the heart of The Office.
As one would expect, the American version is a bit sunnier (but not too much). Even though Michael often infuriates his superior, Jan Levinson-Gould (Melora Hardin), he still shows enough flashes of competence at his job in order to keep it. This is in contrast to David, who could at best be described as staggeringly incompetent at his work (even spending an entire week doing no more work than scribbling down notes for a ludicrous game show). While often obliviously insensitive, Michael also lacks David’s darker side and flashes of real anger. The writers of the British show realized that people who try as hard to be liked as David does are, at heart, deeply unhappy people and we see David legitimately lash out on several occasions. The American show, meanwhile, hints at Michael’s true loneliness (his improv classmates don’t like him, he gets left off the guest list when Jim throws a party), but never really makes him appear as angry as David Brent does at times.
Jim (John Krasinski) and Pam (Jenna Fischer)
Since the Tim/Dawn relationship was resolved after the Christmas special that occurred after the second season, and Pam/Jim acted on their romantic feelings at the end of the second American season, the American show will have the challenge of showing us what happens after Pam/Jim kiss. My one request to the show’s writers is this: If you want Jim/Pam to be together, then let them be together. Please don’t do what Friends did with Ross and Rachel and manufacture a bunch of phony, contrived reasons for them to be apart just to try and sustain conflict. So many sitcoms do this. Afraid that if two characters end up together that all tension and conflict will evaporate, shows often resort to inventing affairs and other silly reasons for characters to break up, just to start conflict. Writers of The Office, I beg you, please, please do not fall into this trap. There are a number of interesting things that could be done with Jim and Pam being in love and working together. Finally, and it’s weird that most sitcom writers fail to realize this, but, even generally happy relationships still have some tension and conflict. You can have that and have Jim and Pam in a relationship with each other without resorting to contrived conflicts, affairs, etc.
In the American show, the rough edge has been removed from the fiancée character. In the British version, Lee was a slimeball, the kind of guy who makes disparaging comments about his girlfriend when she’s not around. In the first episode of the American show (by far its weakest episode), it seems like Roy will be an imitation of Lee, but as the show progressed, it became more and more clear that Roy was more of an oblivious meathead than an out-and-out jerk like Lee. He is not the right guy for Pam, but he does not seem like a particularly bad fellow, either. While this removes some tension (in one British episode, Lee shoved Tim against a wall for acting a little too familiar with Dawn), it also adds a layer of complexity. In the British show, no one feels an iota of sympathy for Lee. However, while I was rooting for Jim and Pam to get together in the American show, I felt a little bad for Roy.
In keeping with the Lee/Roy theme of losing edge but gaining complexity, the characters of Gareth and Dwight differ as well. Since the BBC has looser standards than American network television, the British show was distinctly R-rated. Some of the R-rated humor came from Gareth, who, aside from being a suck-up and a stickler for rules, is also a total pervert. Even though he is one-dimensional, Gareth is still a good character. Like so much in The Office, I could recognize people I’ve known who were just like Gareth. On the American show, Dwight does not have Gareth’s kinkier qualities. However, he is a little more complex than his British counterpart. I never felt sympathy for Gareth. Even though the character was often funny, he was generally annoying.
The American show establishes this complexity in perhaps its richest episode (titled “Conflict Resolution”), Michael decides to dig up every complaint issued to Human Resources in confidence and attempt to resolve it. Toby (Paul Lieberstein), the Human Resources guy, has been telling Dwight for years that his weekly complaints about Jim have been sent to the “special file” at the corporate offices in New York City. Because of Michael’s posturing, Dwight discovers that his complaints have merely been put in a box and ignored. In a room with Jim and Dwight, Michael reads all of Dwight’s complaints aloud. All of them involve pranks Jim has played on Dwight over the years, and Jim denies none of them. When he finds out his complaints have been ignored, Dwight goes ballistic. Here, for the first time, I felt a degree of sympathy for Dwight’s character, something I never felt for Gareth. While Dwight is largely an annoying suck-up, most people would be upset if they had pranks played on them as often as Jim torments Dwight. Most people would be even more upset if they found out that their complaints about said pranks were being ignored. During the episode, Jim quietly admits to the camera, “Yeah, they don’t seem all that funny when you read them back to back like that.”
The episode itself is a delight. All of the complaints are unearthed and previously unspoken animosities are brought out into the open. In a great tracking shot, the camera follows Carell as he walks through the office and we get to see almost every employee sitting at his/her desk, noticeably sulking. The employees’ pain is very real. In real life, we often have unspoken resentments towards people we work with or encounter on a daily basis (and they likely have some about us). However, certain things are better left unsaid and The Office shows us how thin of a line we walk between tolerating those we see every day and despising those we see every day.
Another difference is that the American show now has 24 episodes in a season and can therefore flesh out the supporting cast more than the British show was able to. My favorite member of the American show’s supporting cast is Toby, the sad-sack HR rep who Michael views as his enemy. Toby is a perfect example of a guy everyone encounters sooner or later at work: the guy who is completely, totally defeated by life and just does not care any more. Nearly every time Toby appears, he gets a big laugh out of me.
David Brent Disco Freak-Out
Considering I’m now over the 2,000 word mark, I suppose I should start wrapping things up. While I may still prefer the British version of The Office, I think the greatest compliment I can pay the American show is that it does indeed stand on its own. It is what a remake should be, something that honors the spirit of its source but creates its own identity. In fact, its only moments of weakness occur when it apes something already done on the British show. For example, when Steve Carell dances horribly in the booze cruise episode, one cannot help but remember Ricky Gervais’ dance during the second season of BBC’s The Office. While Carell is generally excellent (as is the entire cast), his dance does not measure up to Gervais’ transcendent bit of physical comedy. This is a minor quibble. Actually, it is a compliment to the remake to be able to tell it “Don’t copy the British show. Do your thing – it’s more than funny enough.”
In the end, it is pointless to try and judge one show over the other. All that needs to be said to the writers and cast of both shows is one word: bravo.