Teevee · 21 February 2003
Have you seen ? I thought Eddie Izzard was the only funny English animal these days. Okay, Black Books was pretty good. The £7000 bottle of wine one was genius.
If you haven’t seen The Office, you should. Get the tape, get the DVD. It’s done in the old fly-on-wall documentary style: all jumpy cuts, earnest responses to off-camera questions, events viewed distantly, through windows and doors. The main character is played by Ricky Gervais, who cowrote the series, and is nothing less than the devil himself in the form of a lager swilling, backslapping, joke mangling regional manager of a paper supplier in , with factory-issue Banana Republic gear and corporate goatee, and, we eventually learn, a fading desire to be a folk singer. When a photo circulates the office with his head photoshopped on the body of a woman on whom two men are ejaculating, he announces that it’s wrong because porn degrades women, an assertion he always follows with a quick, correcting, ‘and I hate that’.
A subplot on the ongoing war between two sales reps is gold: one’s a scrawny paranoid claiming to be a former soldier who hates people touching his things, the other is dedicated to making the former’s life hell. This includes, but is not limited to, suspending his cherished stapler in Jell-o.
The first episode lives up to something I’ve been wanting to see done for years: a truly accurate rendering of the dark comedy and black pit of hell that is life in the contemporary, proactive, motivated, terrified office. Such an effort would fall flat if all it did was ridicule office workers. D*lbert springs to mind there. The Office is so much richer, addressing the familiar but ultimately jarringly resonant motivations of people trying to make a living and deal with other humans, alongside the eye-crossing comic idiocy of management theory in operation, and the aching, cringing, faux-genial mannerisms required to be a team player – to jump out of the box, thinkwise – in the office landscape.
Plus it’s fucking funny.
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