T.V.

Nobody who has seen the BBC series “The Office” has anything bad to say about it, and there’s a reason for that: it’s perfect. It’s a comedy that doesn’t make you laugh, and at times it is close to unbearable; some people like it so much that they can’t watch it. That’s how good it is.

Created and directed by the writers Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, “The Office,” a pretend BBC documentary about a “typical workplace,” captures, with awful brilliance, both the details of day-to-day office life and what the larger landscape of working life has come to look like over the past few decades, since words such as “redundancy” and “downsizing” and the even more chilling “rightsizing”—“right” according to whom?—have forced their way into our vocabulary. Gervais also stars as David Brent, an insecure, infantile office boss, who wants to be popular with his employees, and who says at various times that he thinks of himself as the head of a family, a “chilled-out” entertainer, a comedian, and, so magnanimous is he to his charges, a foreign-aid worker.

David’s delusions and his defensive behavior—he is acutely aware of the camera, and he goes through endless contortions to try to kick sand over the obvious self-interest behind his every decision and declaration—are the heart of the show (both the character and Gervais himself have become household names in Britain), but Gervais and Merchant, who once worked together in the office of a radio station, are generous in their writing, and several other characters are just as vivid. The series consists of only two seasons—twelve half-hour episodes in all—which aired here, on BBC America, in 2003 and are now available on DVD. Gervais and Merchant decided, even before they began filming the second season of their deskumentary, that it would be the last; they didn’t want the quality to drop off. But they did leave their story open-ended enough to allow a return to it someday, and so it was that they came up with a Christmas special that aired in Britain last December and will be shown on BBC America later this week. (NBC, which failed miserably last year with a remake of the British show “Coupling,” is, bless its heart, now remaking “The Office” for next year, with Steve Carell as the star.)

“The Office” is set at a branch of a paper company called Wernham Hogg, situated in the industrial town of Slough, west of London. What we see of Slough in the opening credits—and that’s all we see of it, except for the parking lot and a local bar—is as dreary as the name promises: a leaden sky, a traffic roundabout, a bus station, an ugly office building. (“The Office” represents the second famous insult to Slough; the first was levelled in 1937 by John Betjeman, in a poem—called “Slough”—railing against rampant industrialization, whose opening lines invite destruction onto the town: “Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! / It isn’t fit for humans now, / There isn’t grass to graze a cow. / Swarm over, Death!” David actually reads a bit of this to the camera, and then, dispensing some of the wisdom he believes he possesses in such quantity, he adds, “Right. I don’t think you solve town-planning problems by dropping bombs all over the place. So he’s embarrassed himself there.”)

Inside the office, the atmosphere is no less dreary, despite the bright lighting: there’s stained pinkish-gray carpeting and standard-issue file cabinets and desks set up in an open seating plan, with the occasional touch that David likes to think boosts morale, such as a toy monkey sitting on top of a coatrack and one of those singing-fish plaques (with dead batteries) on the wall. There’s no soundtrack (or laugh track), so all we hear besides voices is the rustle of paper, the ringing of phones, and the low chattering of copiers and printers. When we’re not in David’s office listening to him talk about his management techniques and his philosophy of life, most of our time is spent around the adjoining desks of Gareth (Mackenzie Crook), an officious team leader who is territorial about his space, and Tim (Martin Freeman), an unambitious sales rep, who, partly out of boredom and partly because he likes to undermine Gareth’s prissiness, embeds Gareth’s stapler in Jell-O, and later drops it out the window. (At home, staplers are just staplers, but in the office they have a totemic power; if you want to rip someone’s heart out, and remind him of his tenuous hold on his job, on his identity, on his very existence, just take his stapler. In the movie “Office Space,” which has a similar setting, a worker whose many humiliations include the filching of his stapler gets his revenge by burning down the building.) Tim, the smartest person in the office, is also the most passive about his career—he talks about going back to university and becoming a psychologist, but he is thirty and still lives at home, and when he is at work he often simply stares into the middle distance. He’s serious, but with drollery around the edges.

Halfway into the first season, Tim makes a romantic faux pas when he asks Dawn (Lucy Davis), the receptionist, out for a drink, thinking, mistakenly, that she has broken up with her fiancé, and for most of the rest of the series he has to act cool, so that neither his co-workers nor the camera will pick up on his pain. Freeman doesn’t do that much with his face, but there’s a spark of life in Tim that comes from the friction of his awareness of his own paralysis rubbing up against his inability, or lack of desire, to do anything about it. (Tim bears some physical resemblance, as it happens, to the earnest rocker Nigel Tufnel, the character played by Christopher Guest in “This Is Spinal Tap,” which Gervais has credited as his biggest influence in making “The Office.”) And because Dawn does feel something for Tim and also can’t show her feelings, the perforce small gestures and looks between them make it seem as though they were in their own private, silent movie.

The overarching drama in the Slough branch is that the company plans to create redundancies; David finds this out from his boss at the beginning of the first series, but instead of working to make his branch shine he spends his days making jokes and trying way too hard to get his employees to like him. He isn’t the boss from hell; he’s the boss from middle-management purgatory. He’s not tyrannical, just puffed-up and ineffective, and none of his employees have enough gumption to quite hate him. They’re almost zombie-like at times—David has a few moments of shtick that probably would make employees laugh, but these drones never respond. David, for better and mostly for worse, is the most spirited person in this Slough of Despond. Gervais draws on a battery of grins and feints and verbiage to convey his need to gain and maintain stature at every turn. You don’t really want to be in the same room as David Brent, but at the same time you can’t take your eyes off him.

The special that follows the series is a departure from the approach that the series itself took. The filmmakers have returned, three years later, to see what the denizens of the Slough branch are up to, and the resulting footage has a self-consciousness that is now a common feature of documentaries and where-are-they-now follow-ups to reality shows. In the series proper, the documentary technique didn’t call attention to itself; in the special, Gervais and Merchant make fun of it. (We hear a Scottish interviewer asking solemn questions such as “Do you miss being in the office environment?”) At the same time, they seem to have bowed under the pressure of the series’ success and given viewers what they thought they wanted: happy endings. Before that, though, we see a lot of shots of David driving in his car and talking to the camera—naturally, he complains about the way he was depicted in the original fake documentary—and of Dawn sitting around in Florida with her fiancé. David, who is no longer at Wernham Hogg, has had a few minutes of minor celebrity—as “that awful boss”—and he makes embarrassing public appearances that end badly. If anything, David has become more full of himself over time: he has upgraded himself to “anecdotalist,” and keeps dropping by his old office without noticing the lack of enthusiasm that greets him each time. He has also cut a pop single, and we see the whole video for it. (At two and a half minutes, it’s a slog.) The special underscores, with a deliberate lack of subtlety and with a clear intent to be funny, the ponderousness that the documentary form is prone to, but that quality also occasionally infects the show itself. The special is funny, if in a less satisfying way than the series, and it would be churlish to deny happiness to characters who have come to seem real to us. Still, one can’t help wishing that Gervais and Merchant had left well enough—great enough—alone. We needed a sequel to “The Office” as much as we need a sequel to “Pride and Prejudice.”



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