The Office: Yankee Style

Let's see Carell bust this move

As anyone who has made the mistake of bringing up BBC's The Office within my earshot knows, I consider this program (especially Season 1) to be as close to televised perfection as we mortals will ever witness. With Thursday night came the inevitable(?) American remake, which I viewed with the aforementioned fear and trembling. Since nearly every attempt to import British television to America, from Fawlty Towers to Coupling, has failed (miserably), expectations were not stratospheric.

On first blush, The Office does not seem to lend itself readily to American transplantation, especially on network television. Its bread and butter is the uncomfortable pause, with nary a canned laugh or musical interlude to relieve the tension. Along with Curb Your Enthusiasm, it has been dubbed "squirm television", sometimes so painful that it is nearly unwatchable.

Other adaptability problems abound. The first line of the original ("I don't give shitty jobs") would have put those prudes at the FCC right over had it appeared on NBC. And while David Brent's racism, homophobia and sexism is tolerated with a stiff upper lip or a raised eyebrow in Britain, we Yanks are far more reactive and litigious when it comes to such things (witness the slap Steve Carell receives in the Episode 2 preview). The Gareth character couldn't be in the National Guard, America's equivalent to the Territorial Army, since he'd probably still be in Iraq on a stop-loss order. It remains to be seen whether Steve Carell can overcome his Daily Show-bred ironic distance and embrace the boss's raw mix of vulnerability and petulance. All this creates some pretty high hurdles to overcome in addition to adapting the source dialogue.

At times, the identical line readings and stilted inflections from the American pilot gave the impression of a high-school theater production (one could almost envision the frumpy drama teacher in the wings, mouthing along with the words). The British version is graced by truly fine acting, while the performances in the American pilot struck me as second tier. I can understand that it would be limiting for the actors to recite line-for-line from the British version; can they bring anything new to the roles as they break from the source material? Also, there is going to be a disappointing loss of sophistication translating from British to American English (saying someone is "rubbish" vs. saying they "suck"), so we'll see what the writers can do with this.

The preview of episode 2 made me laugh harder than anything in the pilot, which is promising since the "Diversity Day" plot seems to depart from the word-for-word recitation that the pilot offerred. Scranton, PA should be a suitable doppelganger for the much-maligned London suburb of Slough (although I might have suggested Burien, WA as a drab American locale).

Can the Yankee version capture the unexpected soulfulness of the original? As Martin Freeman's Tim remarks in the Christmas Special, we have no control over who we work with. They are just people with whom we pace the same patch of carpet on the weekdays, yet we spend more time with our coworkers than with our friends or family. And just as you can't escape the family you were born into, the paralysis afflicting the Slough office drones created a surrogate family that they must suffer through.

With my admitted bias in favor of the original, the watered-down The Office is still one of the best five sitcoms on network television at the moment. I have some (unexpectedly) high hopes.