The Office: Why the UK original was so influential/important...

[Darren Dirt]

...to what (imo) we now take for granted as smart, modern comedy

http://www.avclub.com/articles/downsizework-experience,58263/

In just 14 episodes, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant took the standard workplace sitcom -- full of will-they/won't-they romances and wacky hijinks -- and brought it slightly more down to Earth. They brought cringe humor into the TV mainstream in a big way. They invented a set of characters that resonated from the very first episode, and they create a full story that leaves at just the right point in time -- twice. The Office is a very funny show and it's a very cringe-inducing show, but for me, what resonates about the series is its ultimately humane nature. It would be so easy for the show to be a cruel exercise in asking us to laugh at the pathetic man at its center, but it never loses sight of the fact that he's desperate for attention and affection. And it does all this without ever blatantly pointing that fact out.

The Office is both about a community that's created out of necessity and boredom, as well as a community that's a very specific reaction to the kinds of TV families we've seen before. Taxi or Cheers would argue that the people you work with can become your real family; The Office knows the people you work with are the people you @%&# around with until it's time to quit.

There had been workplace sitcoms before and great ones. Even if we limit ourselves to British comedies, we can still come up with reliable old Fawlty Towers and dozens of others. There had been cringe humor worked into sitcoms before as well, even as this show is often cited as the first show to really utilize it. (Seinfeld, in particular, was fond of scenes where a character would find themselves in a hole and then just keep digging, to our embarrassed delight.) Both of the plots that form the hidden spine of the series, as opposed to individual episodes, are old ones, with one threatening the office itself with closure and the other involving a bored flirtation that might evolve into something more if not for outside obstacles constantly thrown in its way. As mentioned, the individual stories were sitcom staples (albeit ones drawn from real life), and it wasn't like Gervais and Merchant's talent for finding the humanity in every single character, even in those characters' worst moments, was something unprecedented in the usually warm and squishy sitcom genre.

What The Office did that was so revolutionary was take away your safety net.