Discovering the original British “The Office” for the first time is one of the most singular television viewing experiences anyone can have, and it’s a feeling I wouldn’t want to spoil for anyone. While there has long been an undercurrent of sadness in much popular British comedy (check out Amazon’s excellent new comedy “Fleabag” for recent evidence of this), no one brought crippling, hair-raising social malaise and pure awkwardness to the fore of their work in the same way that “The Office” creators Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant did in their flagship show’s brief, two-season run. The saga of David Brent and the employees of paper company Wernham Hogg was one that placed acrid silence where a punchline should have theoretically landed. The mood of the show was often morally deflating, never liberating in the way that much so-called comedy is. Sometimes you wanted to laugh, other times you wanted to crawl out of your own skin.
READ MORE: 7-Minute Video Essay Explores The Cringe Effect In ‘The Office’
Of course, NBC’s American adaptation of “ The Office” – starring Steve Carrell as oblivious, oversensitive boss Michael Scott, a less creepy and more genial David Brent – is one of the more popular sitcoms of its time. And while the show’s first season adhered fairly strictly to the first season of Gervais and Merchant’s show, it became clear in its subsequent seasons that the American ‘Office’ had no interest or intention of going as dark as their counterparts across the pond. The look of the show even seemed to brighten, as it came to visually resemble a traditional single-camera sitcom more than the grubby and despairing environs that were portrayed in the British import.
The differences and similarities between the two existing versions of “The Office” is the primary focus of a new video essay from the folks at Now You See It. The primary argument proposed herein seems to be that many American television comedies are too fundamentally optimistic to allow their characters to truly fail. Consequently, it is argued that British is usually told from the perspective of the failure, the loser, the character who would be a laughingstock in any other show. Consider, for example, the episode of the American “The Office” in which Michael Scott finds out that his employees have thrown a party without inviting him. It’s a cruel, humiliating moment, but the show milks it for a fleeting laugh before quickly moving on and giving Michael a happy ending in the form of a karaoke duet with John Krasinski’s Jim Halpert. The U.K. ‘Office’ offers us no such reprieve. Instead, David Brent goes buck-wild at a grim holiday party, and there’s no cathartic release, no happy ending. His employees merely stand in front of him, slack-jawed, watching with a mixture of embarrassment and horrific fascination. The same goes for the end games of both respective show’s lead characters: whereas Michael Scott gets to move back to Colorado with his fiancée and live a happy life at the show’s end, Gervais and Merchant’s ‘Office’ ends with a broken, desperate David Brent all but begging for his measly job back.
As the narrator admits, the theory that the essay proposes is somewhat outdated, especially since we’ve seen a number of American sitcoms in the last couple of years (“Louie,” “You’re the Worst,” “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”) that center around protagonists some folks might consider losers. Still, it’s illuminating to watch clips of the two shows side by side, and fans of either ‘Office’ will want to give it a look.