Rob Blackhurst

9/02/2004

AK13

Can the US remake The Office without destroying it? By Rob Blackhurst.

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As filming for the American remake of The Office begins, some of the loudest groans have come from American TV critics. They shrink with horror at the idea of Wernham Hogg's Slough branch turning into a gang of wisecracking New Yorkers with zany friends who work in the media, perhaps because they still remember the US remake of Fawlty Towers – without Basil Fawlty. As one writes: "network executives have not recently displayed the steely willpower it takes to put a sitcom on the air without laugh tracks, adorable child actors and obvious jokes".

When the original series went out on BBC America, the Anglophile contingent made it a word-of-mouth cult hit in major East coast cities and required viewing for Hollywood executives. Ricky Gervais is convinced the remake can work: "It is a ridiculous misconception that Americans won't get irony, sarcasm or satire. Americans do irony as well – if not better – than us. You've got The Simpsons and Spinal Tap."

However, the critics' worst fears have not come to pass. The comedy will be set in a paper-merchants in Newark, New Jersey – an anonymous commuter town – rather than in some Greenwich Village media loft. True to the original, it will have a docusoap format, shorn of a laughter track, and feature a boss who craves the affection of his employees.

It seems a peculiar strain of English insularity to believe The Office scenario will not work elsewhere. Though British critics place Brent at the end of a long line of self-deluded British comic archetypes – from Captain Mainwaring to Alan Partridge – he embodies trends that exist beyond the English Channel. Brent's thirst to "be something" is an emotion as strong in St Louis as it is in Slough. And the strange intimacy of office life – where you spend more time with colleagues than your own family – is true everywhere in the western world. As more people live alone, the office becomes a social crutch. The main reason Brent is such a terrible boss is that he relies on his colleagues to provide affirmation and a ready audience. These themes seem universal.

But some of the comedy does feel too parochial not to get lost in translation. Brendan Bernhard from the Los Angeles Weekly felt it was condescending: "The Office is perhaps a little too eager to dismiss such work as meaningless, almost beneath contempt. I, for one, use paper quite a lot, and am happy someone's out there supplying it." True enough, but Tim and Dawn represent an age of British mass education: graduates with dreams of stimulating jobs, yet stuck in office drudgery. Their melancholy arises from the haunting sense they could be doing something better, not because they deal with Brent's attention deficit syndrome. As Gervais says: "It is about making a difference and not wasting your life. We used Tim to show that if you are not happy, do not kid yourself".

It is also doubtful whether the paper-sharp satire of "blue-sky thinking" and false bonhomie will ever have mainstream appeal in the country that spawned these trends. Brent's cod philosophising, and insistence on endlessly performing, sets a British audiences' teeth on edge; yet, in more spiritual, ideological and extrovert culture, they might be seen as the whacko behaviour of a fun boss.

And the US critics' strong moral judgements about the comedy reveal a cultural gulf between the US and Britain. US reviewers routinely describe Dawn's attempts to woo Tim as "pathetic", and they denounce the office as a "place where no-one in their right-mind would ever want to work". Brent is a monster, according to Robert Wilonskey of the Dallas Observer: "a pathetic man who says things no rational human being would ever think in private". Americans perceive new boss Neil as Brent's heroic foil: "handsome, athletic and – above all – effortlessly popular", in the words of the New York Times. But, for a British audience, Brent's vulnerability is more endearing than Neil's slick public school complacency. The point of Brent is that he is not unusual; his workplace is not an extraordinary chamber of horrors.

The Office's power comes from the thrill of recognition, not from its appalling characters – "joyless drones lorded over by a self-centred jerk" as one US reviewer wrote. Again, tenderness towards the characters arises from the fact they all suffer existential angst: Brent in his need for popularity and Gareth in his need for status – he constantly tries to change his job title to "Assistant Regional Manager" rather than "Assistant to the Regional Manager". And, most poignantly of all, the two most attractive characters, Tim and Dawn, turn out to be as self-deluded as the rest, believing change lies just around the corner. Perhaps these are simply differences in comic tradition; British audiences love the eccentric deluded fool, where cool charm and competence seduces US audiences. Critical responses to The Office do seem to show two countries divided by a common language. There are already two David Brents out there – before the first reel of the remake has even been shot.