The Office: The Complete BBC Collection (First and

Thanks Dave!
I would probably have missed seeing this fabulous series had I not seen Ricky Gervais on David Letterman. Letterman said in effect that Ricky’s show, The Office, was one of the rare TV comedy series that was hilarious, simply “perfect” and an instant classic. With such high praise I had to seek it out, and I was not disappointed.Excruciatingly funny in its honest and knowing approach to the realities of dull office routine, populated with characters diplaying the everyday weirdness of the everyday people one can find oneself working beside, and filmed with the brilliant creative stroke of a cinema verite documentary style, this is an acute and perceptive look at how people behave and what constitutes the working lives of most of us.That, and it is screamingly funny in its sly and witty, surgical dismemberment of its character’s various pretenses. Like an autopsy done on laughing gas, this is a wincingly hilarious examination of basic human foibles, that cuts deep and true, and yet never loses sight of the flawed humanity therein.Starting with co-creator, writer and director Ricky Gervais’s monumentally obtuse, politically incorrect, inept and, usually, stunningly self-deluded office manager, David Brent, forever cringingly doing or saying the absolutely inappropriate thing when not winking at the camera and expounding his inane, self-congratulatory and insipid “management philosophy”. It is a fabulously rich character and Gervais plays him to perfection. Brent is such a total jerk, yet so helplessly so, one simply can’t hate him. It is a rare and marvelous turn, and a great gamble to make your central character such an unsympathetic twit without making him inhuman, and Gervais deserves high praise indeed for both the writing and the performance.The rest of the characters, large and small, are written and played with equal insight and intelligence. The angular and dense Gareth; the intelligent but stymied Tim; the sweetly trapped and yearning Dawn; the loutish and nasty Chris; the competent and ambitious Neil; Keith,the lumbering accountant, he of the terse and enigmatic observations; and the other office folk we get bits and glimpses of, usually with the telling remark or gesture that reveals. We see dithering, goofing-off, dead-time, and the aches and fumblings of unrequited office romance.The story arc makes sense and over the course of the series we watch David Brent take himself right over-the-cliff, self-destructing as the ultra-smooth professionals cooly down-size, merge, and eliminate. Brent is no match for them, and somewhere inside, he knows it. The wrap special, which takes place 3 years after the supposed documentary has aired, neatly resolves many plot-lines, or at least does so for that moment. The Office always lets you know that life goes on, and nothing is ever resolved forever.It is a shame to have to write so seriously about something that is so damn funny. I laughed out loud many many times, and even the painfully wince-inducing behaviour was done with great good humor. If you liked This Is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind, you will have the right sensibility for this series. This is brilliant work here, more true than any “reality TV”, and well worth your while.

I love this series. It makes me squirm to watch it at times, but Ricky Gervais tapped into a voyeuristic – almost schadenfreude – type of medium to tell a story that is hard to define. A comedy? Yes, but only broadly so. It has humanity at its core, but not the clean and reverential humanity that we tend to see idealized on TV. Rather it is flawed and sorry, and told in such a way that you squirm and laugh at the same time. I don’t think that I would have liked it as much without the Christmas Special to close it out and allow some redemptive closure to David Brent, inferred though it might be.As a total, the two six-episode series and the two-part Christmas Special are in my opinion some of the best TV I’ve ever seen.

Very funny

…seriously painful. For anyone who even has the slightest tendency to emulate TV personalities, STAY AWAY FROM THIS SHOW! These characters have little to no redeeming qualities; total prats, the whole lot of ’em. It’s funny on TV, but not fully in real life. And that gap is bridged on far too many occasions through this 2 season series. Lord help me if I ever see someone break out a guitar during a meeting at my office…