The Office (UK) Review

Gervais and Merchant write, direct and finish the whole thing in fourteen episodes, and that discipline is the argument. Two series of six, a two part Christmas special in 2003, and then nothing. Nobody is promoted into likability. David Brent is not a good heart buried under bad management, he is a man who needs the room to laugh and will humiliate anyone present to get it, and the show declines to soften him until the specials, where the mercy he finally receives has to be earned in front of a camera crew he begged to keep filming.

That is the split with the American version, which is a genuinely great sitcom running a different engine. Michael Scott becomes lovable, Scranton becomes a family, and two hundred episodes of warmth come out of it honestly. Slough gets no family. The documentary conceit here stays hostile: the camera catches the wrong reaction, holds on the silence after a joke dies, and finds Tim looking straight down the lens because there is nobody in the room worth telling.

Mackenzie Crook plays Gareth completely without a wink. Martin Freeman and Lucy Davis run a romance in glances that the writing never lets either of them say out loud until the last twenty minutes of the entire run. It takes the BAFTA for situation comedy in consecutive years and a Peabody, and in 2004 becomes the first British comedy to win the Golden Globe in its category, with Gervais winning for himself the same night. It sits at A rather than higher on scale alone: this is a small and nearly perfect object, and the mockumentary grammar it invents gets carried further by the shows that copy it.