Contrary to popular belief, it is possible to time travel – just watch the Australian remake of The Office. Viewing this version of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s massively influential mockumentary series as a portal through time is a good way to make sense of it, because boy does this show grab the skeletons of a fusty old format and jangle them in your face.
Given The Office has already been remade a dozen times – including a brilliant long-running US version that (apologies to my British colleagues) surpassed the original – the key challenge for the Australian reboot was to bring something new to the table. The amazing thing is that the creators don’t seem to have even tried. The mockumentary is so done that even the Muppets were goofily mocking the format – in 2015. Even then, Stuart Heritage rightly noted that cutaway character interviews “would have been a sophisticated touch had this been made in 2005, but now just comes off as grimly rote”. Almost a decade later, what do we call it now? Morbidly rote?
Giving the series a fleck of novelty is the casting of a female lead, a first for The Office (though you could argue that the very funny Amy Poehler did it first in Parks and Recreation, which was developed as an Office spin-off). Comedian Felicity Ward does a good job in a tough role, inheriting the poisoned chalice of the David Brent/Michael Scott character, bringing the expected desperation and simmering loneliness to Hannah Howard, manager of Sydney-based box company Flinley Craddick.
The pilot episode has a faint ring of topicality, with Howard deciding to end work from home arrangements and mandating full-time attendance in the office, attempting to up productivity and save the branch from closure. But from the start the jokes are pretty lame: in a staff meeting, for instance, Howard notes the pleasure of “seeing a roomful of smiling faces” as director Jackie van Beek cuts to her unimpressed looking audience. Ho ho ho.
There is of course an adversarial relationship between the Tim/Jim character, Nick (Steen Raskopoulos), and the now gender-flipped Gareth/Dwight character, Lizzie (Edith Poor), as there was in previous iterations. Early on Nick asks Lizzie to stop making loud noises on her computer, and when she does not, he retaliates by taking a toy from her desk. Which bit’s the funny bit? Subsequent episodes (this review encompasses all eight) incorporate plotlines involving pyjama day at work, an employee sleeping in the storage room, a broken coffee machine, and other edgeless scenarios that feel comically ancient.
The cast do their best but look a bit dazed and glassy-eyed, like fish nearing their last breath. I felt particularly bad for Edith Poor, who was clearly directed to sound, behave and even look a little like Rainn Wilson’s Dwight, ensuring she’ll be constantly compared to one of the funniest performances in 21st century television that was finessed over 200-odd episodes and nine seasons. Watching Poor play a character who’s Dwight, but not really Dwight, in a production that’s kind of The Office, but not really The Office, feels, as does the show itself, like a bad case of deja vu.
I liked the Melbourne Cup Day-themed episode (directed by Christiaan van Vuuren) the best, mostly because it is distinctively ’Strayan: the Flinley Craddick team dressing up and boozing on the country’s annual celebration of horse flagellation. I also had a chuckle in episode seven, which deploys Mr Inbetween’s Justin Rosniak as “Reptile Phil”, the ocker owner of a cut-rate tourist attraction. It is interesting that, despite several cast members being from New Zealand, as well as two of the show’s three writers and directors – van Beek and Jesse Griffin – this show is being billed as the Australian take. Maybe we should redub it The Office Australasia?
But accents and a few plot points aside, The Office Australia is so lacking in distinctive flavour, and so adherent to such a generic format, that it feels like it belongs to nowhere. Perhaps even nowhen, being as dislodged from the space-time continuum as it is. Will this put a nail in The Office franchise coffin, ending this thing once and for all? If it does, most people will probably react by asking themselves the same question they could ask about the show itself: shouldn’t this have happened a long time ago?