Professionalism is.
What makes a show perfect, and why The Office was
This coming Christmas - I know, I’m sorry - will be the 20th anniversary of the finale of The Office (UK). I’m writing about its first episode here as part of an ongoing series; but if you’re worried Artless is about to become an Office-themed substack for the foreseeable, then don’t: the subsequent parts will run on Medium. Follow me there to make sure you keep getting them. Otherwise, normal transmission resumes here next week.
Film review social media site for the unemployed, Letterboxd, has a star-rating system. On it I’m loath to give too many films the full-whack five, not because I’m stingy. To me a full score means perfect. But also perfect doesn’t mean it’s better than anything else. Only that you can’t think of what you’d amend — nothing missing in the film that should’ve been there, nothing there that shouldn’t be — to make it better. Perfection in art isn’t what is most but what is just right. It’s in this sense that The Office is a perfect TV show.
Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s decision to end it after thirteen episodes (including the finale which aired in two parts) is mostly admired as a canny way to make sure they didn’t outstay their welcome, didn’t give themselves time to mess up. But the length of the show is also what means it can be perfect.1 Till a story ends it doesn’t have a shape you can judge; and while shows that aren’t still-running soaps or abruptly cancelled have endings of their own, a show that ends on its 200th episode has about as much form as one of those bubbles trailed out by a soapy busker in the park. At the ending of The Office you can still see the start because it’s only twelve episodes behind you. It’s like how I wrote in favour of short stories: the work exists in your mind as a whole, and at the same time you can keep track of its parts.2
“Life isn’t about endings, is it?” says Tim (Martin Freeman) in the last episode of show’s original run, “It’s a series of moments.” The nice irony here is that he’s a fictional character in a made-up story. And stories, artworks, are actually the inverse of life as he defines it: they have a design. What makes an artwork great is how its parts knit together, balance each other, how themes recur and vary, how set-ups are paid off, how it’s so much more than “a series of moments.”
Since Gervais and Merchant made their show relatively short they (and their team) had the right scope to integrate all its parts well, and for the audience to notice how they’d done so. Jokes that might’ve seemed cheaply edgy in isolation warrant their existence by setting up plot points a few hours along: in the first episode, Gareth (Mackenzie Crook) seems to be carping against political correctness with a thought experiment about “a little midget fella driving a fork-lift” when actually he’s talking about a real member of staff Anton (“a lovely bloke”); but in the last episode of the series Anton returns, if by name only; the man David Brent (Gervais) brashly hired in the show’s opening scene is the same he fires, in favour, so the man accuses him, of Anton. Other walk-on characters from late in the show are also there in the first episode, like Oggy the Oggmonster (Merchant), mentioned in Gareth’s brag about a night’s drinking. More fatefully, via David’s own brag (“El vino did flow”), we first hear about Chris Finch (Ralph Ineson) then hear the man himself with his bass voice on a boorish answerphone message — the man who’s the pits against which David, in thirteen episodes time, will at last bounce back.3
Did Gervais and Merchant plan everything from the start, or, as the making of the show progressed, just draw on what they’d already written? Neil Gaiman explaining how he plotted his comic The Sandman said his trick was to set lots of plates spinning without necessarily knowing what each was for, but then not forgetting any when it came time to pull off the endgame. Whichever was the case with The Office doesn’t in fact matter, only the finished product does: that nothing is wasted, there’s no fizzle-outs, loose threads, dead-ends, as with certain other prestige shows I could name.
Or almost. There’s a barely noticeable tonal flub in the first episode. I only mention it because Gervais and Merchant in the directors’ commentary reassess the scene where Tim gives Gareth’s stapler the aspic treatment as too broad a sitcom gag (which is also why they deleted a scene of a private meeting that gets more and more packed). But if it jars it’s only in contrast with the rest of a show that had found such a rich new vein of what can be funny, of what type of stories can be told well on TV.
I don’t mean workplace comedies, of which there’d been hundreds before. Neither does the show’s originality lie in it being the first ‘cringe comedy’. A cliché the moment it was coined, this rehashes the cod-psychology that we deal with embarrassment by venting our tension through laughter in the same way we do at scary movies or rollercoasters. (Meanwhile calling TV shows cringe comedies fast became a way to simply flag what you didn’t get or wouldn’t try.) What’s worse, the phrase isn’t really applicable. With The Office we’re not primarily laughing to relieve the cringe.
This might not seem obvious from the set-up of the show’s love story. The first interaction between Tim and Dawn (Lucy Davis) is when she’s nail-combing his hair (some early ASMR there for you). The episode continues the ruse they’re romantically involved when Tim says, “See, this is why we’re going out.” Then Lee, the man she’s actually going out with, interrupts. This fake-out wasn’t just for the sake of subverting an expectation; it also sets up Tim and Dawn’s predicament, which forms the second emotional through-line of the show (a rising line that crosses David’s falling one…). Left alone with Lee, Tim struggles for something to say, a silence which both sides break at the same time — “What’s in the bag?”/ “Tell her I’ll see her later” — the equivalent of two people trying to walk out of each other’s way but mirroring each other instead.4Their interaction, their conversational pratfall is itself funny.
The show goes further than finding comedy in such awkward social situations; it finds it in comedy as a social practice. In episode one, David, Tim and the new temp Ricky (Oliver Chris) tease Gareth about his jellied stapler, competing to make the best dessert-based pun, till David falls behind. The show’s originality is in depicting not just jokes but the space around them, the bad air after a dud one, the Riffer’s Block before, all of which you might only have seen before at a live comedy show. With them in The Office we don’t laugh to stop feeling embarrassed, any more than we laugh at a joke to stop finding it funny. The embarrassment, the awkwardness is funny: because so well observed, so ringing true. The cringe has an appeal in and of itself, like sour sweets (and maybe ‘soursweet’ is a better phrase anyway than bittersweet to describe the show).
Comedy as a social practice, as a genre, as entertainment is as a much a topic of The Office as work. All its references to comedies from the time — Dawn is reading Ben Elton’s novel Popcorn; David contrasts himself with Jonathan Ross and Lenny Henry — assert The Office’s place in the history of comedy (and contrasts its own style with theirs). And these references are often made by characters who are comedy geeks, which is a very British type (and a type the show would satirise in episodes to come, notably in the office quiz).
The biggest geek of them all, David Brent, touring Ricky (and us) through his first day in the office, stops to read out a cartoon pinned to a noticeboard: “Does my bum look big in this?”, a catchphrase from sketch comedy The Fast Show — one of many that saturated 90s British pop culture. But in the cartoon’s case, or so Brent reassures us, it “isn’t sexist, it’s the bloke saying it. At last.”
This combination of pop culture awareness and political correctness, Brent’s need to come across as both with it and right-on, the clash between being funny and seeming good is the janky dynamo of his character. He never is quite with it. He knows the puppet from ‘Flat Beat’ on sight, and he can say “Whazzap!” like anybody else who saw the Budweiser ad. But when he chokes out the word, “RESOLVE!”, an 80s antacid product, he’s exposing his age.
The gap between someone’s self-conception and reality is old ground for comedy, maybe the oldest. What makes Brent special is that his gap is in how funny he is, and how popular. Brent had a predecessor here in Charlie Higson’s character from The Fast Show, Colin Hunt, the office funny guy who’s not as funny as he thinks. Which fits Brent, but not completely.
He isn’t just a Whacky Guy, a comedy geek, a repository of pop culture trendy and dated. He also wants in on that culture: he’s a wannabe showbiz entertainer. And one who, with his story being set in the UK at the turn of the millennium, is at the promising dawn of micro-celebrity, the ascendance of reality TV, and the high noon of talkshows and tabloids before social media muscled in on their libidinal turf.
This media context is why it’s so perfect that the company he works for sells paper: blank, silent, inert, in contrast to TV screens which are either black or multicoloured and loud. (It’s like how the factory Bart and class visit in The Simpsons doesn’t make anything that goes in boxes; they just make boxes.) When Tim in his first address to camera describes his job he says, “I’m boring myself talking about it.” Perhaps one of the reasons we resent work is not because it is boring. Since we are what we do, and what we mostly do is work, then we are boring. Which would be scary to admit for someone like Brent who thinks of himself as “probably an entertainer.”
That his entertainer reach exceeds his grasp isn’t heroic; neither is it just tragic. It’s an especially satisfying match between a character’s desire and the form of their story. For The Office is a mockumentary; the show within the show, a documentary about office life, is what Brent hopes will be his window to fame-gain.
Now that there are so many it’s good to remember The Office wasn’t the first TV mockumentary. In the years before there was Chris Langham’s bumbling review of British workplaces, People Like Us, and Julia Davis and Rob Brydon’s divorce-diary Marion and Geoff. But what The Office pioneered on TV was a mockumentary about someone longing to be on TV. With it the mockumentary format isn’t a convenience for the show-makers, it’s essential. For it’s the eye of the camera, the ear of the mike that tantalises, energises and maddens the characters.
Some are caught out by the TV light, rabbit-eyed Gareth in particular, again and again. In this episode he thinks he’s talking to Tim over a wall of box files, then slowly suspects Tim isn’t there, but he’s not fast enough to avoid the camera when he gives in and checks. As for Tim, we get the first of his many, and soon legendary, overt looks at the camera or stares to one side, so the viewer can register his exhausted astonishment.5 Gervais gets praised for his physical acting usually over grandstanding moments like that dance, or his attempt to staunch a fizzing-over bottle with his mouth in Extras. He doesn’t get enough praise for subtler facial and gestural work. In the opening of the show Brent in quick succession grows Pinocchio’s nose, does the sign of the cross and types out an imaginary CV. When he suggests that Gareth tell Ricky about his kung-fu and car-flipping skills he starts miming the former, but when Gareth starts with the latter, he turns on a pin to mime a steering wheel instead. And from his first camera address onwards, Brent always has a pre-smirk twitch or half-pout on his face, as well as his own glances off camera or into it. But what he thinks is a window, something that reflects as well as letting you through, is really a cursed crystal ball.
Well he got what he wished for. He might claim he’s “a friend first, a boss second, probably an entertainer, third,” but we all know the real order. With his unserious peace-brokering between Gareth and Tim in the first episode, it’s clear he’s long suffered from the flaw of the Funny Teacher: wanting to be liked more than respected. The documentary crew simply work that flaw wider and wider.
Declaring himself an entertainer cues a prank in the last scene of the episode to prove it and impress Ricky (and the cameras). Its other cue was Tim putting Gareth’s stapler in jelly; as Brent told Tim, “The thing about practical jokes is you’ve got to know when to start as well as when to stop.” Or when not to do one in the first place… The victim of his is Dawn, whom he pretends to sack for stealing post-its. There’s a subtle hint in it too of Brent’s pettiness, of payback-back-and-forth. Earlier in the episode he’d joked “at one time or another every bloke here has woken up at the crack of Dawn.” And so when he bragged about his drinking she let on that he did it “every lunch time.” Having scolded her for keeping tabs he now makes her the butt of his practical joke. But instead of laughs we hear whimpering off camera, then cut to Dawn wiping tears from her cheek.
These bad things the cameras make him do will be David’s doom. And the first steps to it were there in the series opener. It’s in a meeting with his boss Jennifer Taylor-Clarke that we first hear mention of his counterpart Neil, nemesis of the second series. David compares Jennifer to the presenters safely in the studio for Comic Relief, the charity TV event that plays such a painful part in his downfall in ten episodes time. From the first episode on the threat of redundancies6 hangs over the show. In the end David will ‘voluntarily’ take his. The trajectory there was mapped out from the start— Dawn lets slip not only about his drinking but a previous nervous breakdown. And it’s in this episode that he tells her, while she eats a cheese sandwich, that he doesn’t have cancer of “them ol’ testicles.”7Maybe though he’d subliminally sensed that his manhood, his sense of who he is as a working man, was coming under threat.
“This story will tell the fall of a human soul,” is how Chekhov described in his letters one that he was about to write.8 The final exchange between David and Dawn after his failed prank stands out on rewatch as though it’s the motif for the whole show to come, its central exposed delusion, the dragged-out epiphany on which his story and soul will hinge:
-You’re such a sad little man.
-Am I? Didn’t know that.
Cue ‘Handbags and gladrags’9 over the credits, a song addressed to a teenage girl, asking what’ll be left of her when she stops trying to be cool. What will be left of Brent? Find out by the end of this series.
At a run-time of ~7h30m The Office is around the length of the film Sátántangó. And that’s with fewer shots of cattle.
The length of The Office is also why I can get away with (?) writing this series without trying your patience or giving myself too heavy a workload. (Htf did those episode recappers of The Walking Dead not eventually turn into zombies?)
Even characters we see only once or who disappear don’t do so arbitrarily. After the first episode we never again see Sanj, confused by David for “the other one” (“The other what? The other paki?”) Whatever the real-life circumstances for this actor not being in the rest of the show, it makes sense a member of staff who made Brent look racist on-camera wouldn’t last (although Brent does mention him again as “an Indian fella’ in exactly one series time). Similarly, Brent-skeptic Malcom (Robin Hooper) needles his boss throughout the first series, and so at the end of it, mealymouthed Brent answering in the negative to say who’s not being made redundant, omits Malcolm. And even though the downsize is called off, it’s easy to see why Malcolm by the second series of the office documentary wouldn’t want to come back.
In the Altman documentary, the director explains that for his first film the producers thought he was a rank amateur because he’d showed characters talking over each other.
Thing is Tim would make a much better candidate for Brent’s aspirations. During the scene where he drops Gareth’s stapler out the window we witness how well he can razz on-his-feet. Half of Tim’s role in the show is to throw into relief how unfunny, or how only unintentionally funny, Brent is.
Tim makes himself the hero of the show from the first episode with his reaction to this threat: “I couldn’t give a shit.”
To this day I can’t eat said cheese without thinking of a grossed-out Dawn saying, “It’s a bit of brie.”
This might be taking it a little far (though as I said, to me, every detail in this show is spot on): but the last shot of the episode is Gareth showing David his stapler again put in jelly. A piece of office equipment, one we associate with paper, trapped, on display, wobbling, refracted through a lens — a joke that’s not funny any more.
In an alternate universe the theme song to The Office, according to Gervais/Merchant would’ve been Cat Stevens ‘Sitting’.