They said it couldn’t be done: no remake of The Office could possibly live up to the ridiculously high standards set by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant in their highly influential British sitcom. By “ridiculously high standards”, I am of course referring to the quality of the show itself, not the quality of the products or employees of the Wernham Hogg paper company: a collection of nitwits led, in the Slough branch, by the awful and incorrigible David Brent – unforgettably and rather perfectly imbued by Gervais with an unrelenting stink of insufferability.
But then the US version of The Office came along, introducing the employees of the Scranton branch of another paper company, Dunder Mifflin, led by a new love-to-hate nincompoop: Steve Carell’s hilariously impetuous Michael Scott. I remember being less than wowed by its opening episodes. But then something crazy happened: the show found its groove, one season rolled into another, and – at the risk of inciting my British colleagues at the Guardian to demand my immediate removal from this masthead – I came to like it much more than the original.
