Back to The Office

Various reviews of this country’s very own remake of The Office (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) have been published in the past week which range from “Why bother re-making The Office?” to “What’s the point of re-making The Office?”. And fair enough, there are already two versions of The Office in English, and countless more in other languages. Why make another?

The reason, presumably, is that it’s harder to get a broadcaster or streamer to take a punt on an original concept, so why not just re-boot something from a few decades back that people remember fondly? The recent reboot of Frasier (which isn’t a patch on the original series, but still has some decent laughs it) is in the middle of its second season, for example. And wouldn’t be in that position unless decent numbers of people had subscribed to Paramount just to watch it.

But is the Australian version of The Office with Felicity Ward as Hannah Howard (the David Brent/Michael Scott role) going to inspire anyone to subscribe to Amazon Prime Video? Based on the first few episodes, absolutely not. It’s just not funny enough, and that’s partly because what people read as funny in 2024 has changed a lot from when The Office debuted in 2001.

Hannah Howard is a rude, self-centred, obnoxious, bullshitting, possible psychopath who shouldn’t be in charge of anyone, let alone a company employing at least 30 people. In the first episode, she ignores instructions from her boss Alisha (Pallavi Sharda) to close the office and let the team go fully remote, something the team want, and forces everyone to come in full time. In other episodes she belittles people, commits tax fraud and promotes her suck-up, power-mad assistant Lizzie (Edith Poor) to a role she is not cut out for.

And, yes, this kind of behaviour is common amongst senior managers, and we all have experience of it. So, we should all be laughing at The Office because it’s true, right?

Er, no. What the makers of this re-boot seem to have forgotten is that quite a lot has changed since 2001, when the original UK version of The Office debuted, and the central tenant of The Office’s comedy was laid down: that watching a bully belittle others is funny.

In 2024, people working in offices are no longer in the mood for this. Think of all the bullies, predators and fraudsters who’ve hit the headlines in recent years, and in some cases been sent to jail, thanks to their former subordinates outing them for abusing their positions. Think of the way that the workers who realised the advantages of working from home during the pandemic, are now quitting jobs that force them to come into the office five days a week. The antics of Hannah Howard are, at best, ill-advised, and at worst will lead to Melissa Caddick or Sam Bankman-Fried-type behaviour, but are not especially funny in and of themselves.

This is not to say there aren’t a few laughs in The Office. Hannah, with one eye on her reputation, makes a lot of decisions so that she doesn’t look like an idiot in front of the ever-present but never seen documentary crew. This leads to her doubling down on some obviously bad calls, like holding a wake for a recently deceased employee, who it turns out no one really knew. The resulting event is, naturally, a disaster. And a funny one.

However, there really aren’t enough scenes that are as good as this throughout each episode. This isn’t the original Fraiser, or even the above-mentioned, not-so-great reboot, where there are lots of funny moments in each scene, all working towards a big moment at the end of the show. The Office prefers to waste the audience’s time, by having a staff member tell the documentary crew how they’re feeling about the situation, when we’ve already seen how they feel about the situation from their visible reaction in the previous scene. Sometimes repeating something is funny, or helpful, to an audience, but in this case…why?

There probably is a way of re-booting The Office in Australia which breathes new life into the format, but this seems like it’s aping something which worked 20 years ago without significantly updating things or adding an original spin. Even the much-promoted fact that the boss is a woman doesn’t bring much to the party. Still, isn’t it great to know that women can be awful bosses too? Finally, feminism has achieved its goals!

An Australia version of The Office is something which didn’t need to exist and likely won’t make much impact with audiences. Because there are better locally made comedies which happen to be set in offices. More on that soon…