Good day at the Office

So, how have the Americans managed to turn The Office from a middling satire designed to promote the ego of the much-fawned-over Ricky Gervais into a pretty good sitcom in its own right?

The answer seems to be to remove the ego. In last night's edition, Steve Carrell's office boss was the butt of jokes on several occasions - the top comedy actor displaying a humility Gervais could learn from. In the British version, although Gervais' character was always the central comedy figue, the humour always came from his humiliating the staff. Although the series was supposedly about a rubbish manager, we were always meant to empathise and feel sorry for his tears of a clown routine. Imagine Fawlty Towers if the audience was supposed to believe that all the terrible things Basil Fawlty did was well-meaning if excessive mean to his wife and staff. But let's not even begin to put Gervais in the same bracket as John Cleese.

The Office US is hugely enjoyable because the mean-spirited characters (the US versions of Brent, Gareth, Finchy) are simply mean-spirited characters and there's no attempt to pull on our heartstrings to love them for any reason other than that are truly horrible. Steve Carrell is a fine comedy actor, and he perhaps understands the characters and the series itself more than the man who created it.