Gareth Keenan Investigates!

Everybody loves the ITV monkey

Much has already been written on the comedic masterpiece that is BBC's "The Office," so I won't waste any of your time with overviews. I would like to focus one technical detail: how the show creates the richest soundscape of any program on television.

Conforming with the documentary style, the directors, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, eschew any music or laugh tracks. Lesser shows have wrecked on the shoals of audience apathy without in-show theme music or laugh-tracks. For every laugh-trackless success like "Arrested Development", there's a graveyard of "Sports Nights", "Bakersfield, P.D.s", and "Actions". What sets "The Office" apart is not just its refusal to clue in the audience about whether a given line is meant to be funny. In the background of every scene is a throbbing forest of beeps, hums and whirs that color the office's bleak interior (and probably make Wilco green with envy). The rhythm of copiers and ringing phones, underlaid with the humming of flourescent lighting and computer fans, is so integral to what any modern office sounds like that it's beyond notice. But this attention to soundtrack is what establishes the eerie realism of "The Office": the viewer hears where they work. These tracks are all added during mixing and editing, so credit where credit is due to the diligent Foley artists at BBC; it's their work that makes "The Office" more alive than anything else on television.