“David Brent and the staff of Wernham Hogg paper merchants in Slough changed the face of British comedy when they first arrived on BBC2 in 2001,” said Tim Glanfield in The Sunday Times.
Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s mockumentary series wasn’t an immediate hit, but it has come to be seen “as one of the most influential sitcoms of the modern era”, and it went on to spawn more than a dozen international versions, the most recent of which has just arrived from Australia on Prime Video.
Writing feels ‘flat’
While some things are the same – Nick and Greta, for instance, “are very much the down under answer to Tim and Dawn” – others are new, said Jonathan Dean in the same paper. “There was no HR department in Slough”, for instance. There’s also – for the first time in the history of “The Office” – a female boss, played by Felicity Ward. But alas, though the “central conceit” of a post-Covid office is fresh, the writing feels “flat” and the characters over-familiar.
A nail in the coffin?
This production is “kind of ‘The Office’, but not really ‘The Office'”; and for fans of the original it might produce “a bad case of déjà vu”, said Luke Buckmaster in The Guardian. From the start, “the jokes are pretty lame”, and the cast look “a bit dazed and glassy-eyed, like fish nearing their last breath”.
“Accents and a few plot points aside, “The Office” Australia is so lacking in distinctive flavour, and so adherent to such a generic format”, that it feels as if it could have been made anywhere, anytime. Perhaps this version will put a nail in the franchise’s coffin once and for all?