Series 1:
* Episode 1 - David Brent learns that his branch of the paper
merchants might be closed down. But he promises his staff that
under his regime there will be no redundancies.
* Episode 2 - Donna arrives on work experience. But her first day
at work is dominated by a dirty picture of her boss that's been
e-mailed around the office.
* Episode 3 - It's Tim's birthday. But it's also the annual quiz
night. Will Brent and Finchy be able to beat the young pretenders
Tim & Ricky?
* Episode 4 - Rowan, a management consultant, has come to Wernham
Hogg to give the staff a special training day.
* Episode 5 - Even though some of the staff may be made
redundant, Brent decides to take on a new secretary. Naturally,
he chooses the prettiest woman.
* Episode 6 - It's judgment day on whether the office is to be
downsized.
Series 2:
Change can be stressful, but manager David Brent reckons he can
cope. Hes got a new boss, hes been recruited to give
motivational lectures and has to integrate the serious and dull
Swindon lot with his own crazy brigade. Elsewhere, Tims got a
new office romance and Red Nose Day gives the whole office a
chance to unwind Finchys still a riot, Keith still has eczema
and Gareth has a talking cookie jar and is still a tosser.
From .co.uk
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It feels both inaccurate and inadequate to describe The Office as
a comedy. On a superficial level, it disdains all the conventions
of television sitcoms: there are no punch lines, no jokes, no
laugh tracks and no cute happy endings. More profoundly, it's not
what we're used to thinking of as funny. Most of the fervently
devoted fan base that the programme acquired watched with a
discomfortingly thrilling combination of identification and
mortification. The paradox is that its best moments are almost
physically unwatchable.
Set in the offices of a fictional Slough paper merchant, The
Office is filmed in the style of a reality television programme.
The writing is subtle and deft, the acting wonderful and the
characters beautifully drawn: the cadaverous team leader Gareth,
a paradigm of Andy McNab's readership; the monstrous sales rep,
Chris Finch; and the decent but long-suffering everyman Tim,
whose ambition and imagination have been crushed out of him by
the banality of the life he dreams uselessly of escaping. The
show is stolen, as it was intended to be, by insufferable office
manager David Brent, played by cowriter Ricky Gervais. Brent will
become a name as emblematic for a particular kind of British
grotesque as Alan Partridge or Basil Fawlty, but he is a deeper
character than either. Partridge and Fawlty are exaggerations of
reality, and therefore safely comic figures. Brent is as
appalling as only reality can be. --Andrew Mueller
On the DVD: Series 1 is tastefully packaged as a two-disc set
appropriately adorned with John Betjeman's poem "Slough". The
special features occupy the second disc and consist of a
laid-back 39-minute documentary entitled "How I Made The Office
by Ricky Gervais", with cowriter Stephen Merchant and the cast
contributing. Here we discover that Gervais spends his time on
set "mucking around and annoying people", and that actress Lucy
Davis (Dawn) is the daughter of Jasper Carrott; as well as seeing
parts of the original short film and the original BBC pilot
episode; plus we get to enjoy many examples of the cast corpsing
throughout endless retakes. There are also a handful of deleted
scenes, none of which were deleted because they weren't funny.
Series 2 is a single-disc release, but the extra features are
enjoyable nonetheless. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant feature
in a gleefully shambolic video diary--highlights of which include
Gervais flicking elastic bands at his cowriter and taping their
editor to his swivel chair. The ubiquitous Gervais also mockingly
introduces some outtakes (mostly of him corpsing throughout
dozens of takes) and a series of deleted scenes, notably of
Gareth arriving in his horrendous cycle shorts. --Mark Walker