The Office Season 5 Review

• 8th Feb 2011

I have to admit to not having seen any of the US versions of The Office, having deliberately avoided it believing this to be sacrilege following the success of the Ricky Gervais/Stephen Merchant creations of the early 00s, even though Gervais and Merchant were co-executive producers of the US show. The box set of the fifth series (the US show is currently on Season 7) contains no fewer than 25 episodes and clearly takes the Gervais and Merchant creations further, at the current 130 episodes, this is at a staggering 116 more than the UK original. I cannot deny that it takes a few episodes to really get into it, but once you have overcome the comparisons and spotting which are the Mackenzie Crook or Martin Freeman characters you can roll with it and enjoy it for its own sake.

Scranton, Pennsylvania appears as the doppelganger of Slough, an average American industrial town where the people seem to stay and seldom move on to better things. The mainstay of course is Steve Carell as the David Brent character, here called Michael Scott, a larger than life character, who merely seems to torment his low self esteem employees totally un-self aware at the damage he causes, perhaps even more so than David Brent and trying, in his own indomitable way to motivate his team, yet merely serving to annoy them. What Carell’s Michael Scott lacks compared to say David Brent is any sense of pity; one gets the sense that he does deserve everything he gets coming his way. One of the finest examples of this is the episode in which comes to work half dressed as Willy Wonka having put golden tickets into boxes of paper in which the recipients will get a 10% discount, only to later discover that the winners are the company’s biggest clients. He then proceeds to put the blame for the idea on sociopath fall guy Dwight (who has already admitted that he hates candy and Willy Wonka as candy was denied him as a kid).

Some of the stories work better than others and many of the characters do come and go from the series. For example the Christmas party tries to move away from the traditional with a Moroccan theme in which it lurches from disaster to disaster and ends with the overweight, middle-aged office lady Phyllis revealing that Dwight (the Mackenzie Crook type character) is having an affair with Angela who is engaged to David. David is very slow on the uptake as he is planning their wedding (and wondering what it would be like to sleep with Angela); previously there had been love rivalry between these two male characters. Other stories have Michael Scott leading his team from Scranton (the company is still a paper firm, now called Dunder Mifflin) on a business trip to Canada and checking into a plush hotel where Carell believes that the hotel concierge can provide all the fantasy needs for the businessmen. He does, however, end up bedding the concierge, but is left bitterly disappointed realising that he had let his lover from a previous episode, Holly, another Dunder Mifflin employee go as she had been transferred 400 miles away. He believed that he and Holly could still spend weekends together, but it all falls apart when she realizes that they would spend the majority of the weekend travelling (he quips to her that he could talk to her on Bluetooth and that way they would still be together!) There is a sense of sadness and desperation behind each of these characters.

The genius behind the original series was the way that people related to it; that anyone who had worked in an office could relate both to its situations and its characters. The genius, in that sense was in its subtlety. That is the one thing that is lacking in the American series. It continually reminds us and the characters that they are part of a reality TV documentary series and that the stories in each episode almost become out of hand such as the Moroccan Christmas party in which porn addicted Meredith’s hair sets alight while drunk and Carell (literally) drags her out of the office party after trying to humiliate her in front of everyone else in order to convince her that she is an alcoholic and drop her off at an rehabilitation centre or the practical joke Jim plays on sociopath Dwight with a wire leading from his computer out of the office and up a telegraph pole which Dwight proceeds to trace takes the jokes that bit further than Gervais and Merchant’s 01/02 original. It is a good introduction to the show and for anyone who has seen the original UK version and not the US one, if this is a first viewing of the American series one can easily dip in here and enjoy.

The DVD is a five disc box set comprising of 25 episodes and includes deleted extras, a clips show called 100 Episodes, 100 Moments and a new featurette, The Academy of Arts and Sciences Presents: The Office.

Chris Hick