The Office (Australia) review

The Australian The Office remake made a global impact earlier this year for all the wrong reasons when X users got hold of its trailer and mocked it brutally. They were certainly on to something.

Most of the many other remakes (16 versions in total!) are not in English and have therefore escaped wider attention. It appears Amazon thought a third Western, English-language version might have wider appeal, and paid for an initial run of eight episodes, though it’s difficult to see how this project managed to reach completion without intervention–it’s bad, really bad, across the board, and would have sunk without a trace but for the famous brand attached to it.

The original was small but perfectly formed and remains one of the best comedy series ever made. It is brilliant from the first minute, and maintains its quality for a short, 14-episode run, that justifiably became a huge critical and commercial hit.

The US Office adopted the same beats, plot points and character archetypes, and quickly came into its own after a weak first episode that was almost a scene-for-scene remake, with quite a different tone from the UK version. Seasons two and three are some of the best seasons of any comedy show in history. 

The US version found its footing by the second episode, the Australian one unfortunately never does. It seems to be trying to take the best parts of the US and UK version, but ends up being worse than the sum of its parts–a lame, cringeworthy, painfully unfunny slog with no heart whatsoever.

The setup remains the same. A struggling suburban company is led by a well-meaning, desperate-to-be-loved, clueless boss (Felicity Ward), who presides over a self-serious sycophantic number two (Edith Poor), a will-they-won’t-they pair of normals who bond over the workplace craziness (Steen Raskopoulos and Shari Sebbens), and a cast of oddball supporting characters.

The problem is, we’ve seen this twice already, and a third time around was probably doomed to failure regardless, even if the product was significantly better. But it is so scared of offending anyone that the jokes are all flat, and there is not a single performance that elevates the terrible script. 

Ricky Gervais and Steve Carrell understood that their characters had to balance obnoxious absurdity and desperate insecurities with well-meaning elements, to evoke embarrassment and sympathy from the audience in equal measure, while also delivering funny-on-paper jokes effectively. Office boss Hannah Howard is just sad. It’s not that Felicity Ward isn’t putting in effort, but without humor and heart in the script, the character simply doesn’t work, and the performance is excruciatingly painful to sit through.

Everyone else is completely forgettable, and you’ll barely even remember anyone else’s names by the end of it. The UK and US versions both very quickly established strong dynamics between the various characters, but there’s none of that here. The Gareth and Dawn/Jim and Pam storyline is short-changed for some reason, and really muted, meaning the heart of the show isn’t there, and it’s not made up for anywhere else. Most of the supporting cast are interchangeable.

Lifeless, drab and totally devoid of humour, there is very little to recommend with this iteration of The Office. No vision whatsoever, it feels like it was written by a committee of government bureaucrats. Any normal person could have stepped in at the concept stage, the scriptwriting stage or the casting stage and seen it was destined for disaster. A shame no one did.

WOKE-O-METER

The Office is unfortunately representative of the woeful state of Australian comedy, which has been captured by a set of safe, unfunny, low-personality individuals who ape famous international comedians and have no writing or performing ability. The industry has been completely taken over by horrifyingly unfunny duds due to a tiny number of gatekeepers who are all rabidly woke or complete cowards.

You can imagine the writers room of DEI virgins giggling hysterically over the idea of telling a threesome joke. The Office makes another recent woeful Australian workplace comedy, Fisk, seem almost mildly amusing in comparison.

Female leads, female creators and a cast covering every victimhood class. Maybe there’s a lesson in there somewhere. Could a splash of meritocracy have saved this expensive flop?

Finally, leftists aren’t satisfied with sucking the joy out of everything, everyone has to be really ugly as well. -GamerGate staff