Product Description

Welcome to Wernham Hogg, a suburban paper company where "life is stationery." Critics and fans alike have lauded this hilarious, biting look at everyday office life, told in the mockumentary style of cult comedy classics such as This is Spinal Tap and The Larry Sanders Show. The show revolves around David Brent, (an instant classic character widely compared to Basil Fawlty of Fawlty Towers) the oblivious general manager who instigates petty office rivalries. The wince-worthy Brent still considers himself "a friend first and a boss second...probably an entertainer third."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6544 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 2003-10-07
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 180 minutes

Features

• Welcome to Wernham Hogg, a suburban paper company where "life is stationery." Critics and fans alike have lauded this hilarious, biting look at everyday office life, told in the mockumentary style of cult comedyics such as This is Spinal Tap and The Larry Sanders Show. The show revolves around David Brent, (an instantic character widely compared to Basil Fawlt of Fawlty Towers) the oblivious gener

Amazon.com
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 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 British paper merchant, The Office is filmed in the style of a reality television show. The writing is subtle and deft, the acting wonderful, and the characters beautifully drawn: the cadaverous team leader Gareth (Mackenzie Crook); the monstrous sales rep, Chris Finch (Ralph Ineson); and the decent but long-suffering everyman Tim (Martin Freeman), 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 codirector-cowriter Ricky Gervais. Brent will become a name as emblematic for a particular kind of British grotesque as Basil Fawlty, but he is a deeper character. Fawlty is an exaggeration of reality, and therefore a safely comic figure. Brent is as appalling as only reality can be. --Andrew Mueller

Customer Reviews

Pathetic, mundane, dark, and undeniably hilarious.
From time to time I go swimming for media outside the mainstream. In the UK, this is as popular there as Curb Your Enthusiasm (which shares similar dark appeal) and approaching Friends. I had to take a look, despite the fact that I never really liked British humor.

The first episode was more confusing than anything else. Done in a documentary style, it chronicled the goings on within, of all interesting venues, a paper company, and followed the relationships between its completely pathetic inhabitants. The office constituency is led by (co-writer of the show) Ricky Gervais who plays David Brent...a cocktail of extreme insecurity, arrogance, and level of social ineptitude that pushes (but doesn't cross) the envelope of possibility.

I'll embarrasingly admit that the unorthodox style took a while to get used to, from no laugh track, to a complete absence of jokes or punch lines. This show plays on a variation of the axiom about "truth being stranger than fiction". Well, after an episode or two, I became totally immersed in the environment, an environment that seemed more like reality than fiction. That threw my switch, I now find this show insanely funny, but the realistic element has a gravity of its own. You start to really care about the characters. Pretty unusual for a comedy series.

So, for those of you who haven't seen it, but are curious, I recommend without reservation. For the rest, get this DVD, it's among the few in my collection that I play frequently.

Hope this helped.

Christian Hunter

The funniestTV import to the States since Monty Python
If it wasn't for "The Office",most people would still think that BBC America only had home and garden shows,EastEnders and Graham Norton on all day.If you've seen the first season's episodes,you already know how great this show is.If not,do yourself a favor and catch up,then buy the DVD and watch it again. Ricky Gervais is so brilliant as the creepily funny David Brent,you WILL actually feel more than a bit uncomfortable and embarrassed for him when he 1)tries too hard to be funny or 2)when he's so clearly unaware of the hole that he's digging that it becomes surreal. And that's the beauty of this show:Take a total idiot meanie of a boss and combine it with the mundane day to day goings-on of working in Corporate(office politics seem to be identical on both sides on the Atlantic) and you immediately recognize the similarities to real life.While David Brent is the linchpin of the show,the characters of Tim,Dawn and Gareth are also essential.A classic play on the office crush subplot(Salesman Tim pines for the lovely but unobtainable receptionist Dawn)grows at a mild but always interesting pace that it reaches a brilliant fever pitch by the second season. And you'd feel bad for Brent's suck-up subordinate Gareth if the practical jokes played on him by Tim weren't so damn funny. Another plus for this series:no laugh track/studio audience to spell out to you what jokes are funny,no gimmicks or situations for the characters to work out(ala "Friends")and no political correctness. It really is reminscent of "Fawlty Towers"or "Curb your Enthusiam"so if you're a fan of either of those,you shouldn't find any problem with "The Office". Again,I say:get the DVD,watch the reruns on BBCAmerica and savor the genius before the Hollywood fat cats make good on their promise and ruin it i.e.making an American version.

Great subtle and dark humour!
I'm a Brit who has enjoyed the office over the past couple of years here in Britain. Needless to say, it is brilliant. David Brent is the boss of this small paper publishing company who are currently being filmed for a documentary to be put on tv (this is just an excuse to allow us to see the world of this office). Needless to say, David thinks he is great and always plays the good guy moralist for the cameras, the rest of his staff think him an idiot though, you soon see why! Great comedy involving embarrassment, peoples relationships and Davids own logical traps as he explain his personal theories of life to the camera crew! There is no laughter track, or jokes per se, but the whole situation renders the program as funny and tragic.

Anyway, i just wanted to say that series 2 is even better (David has to put up with the boss of the other branch and his staff. The new boss called Neil is genuinely nice, funny and fair. The staff are all very normal and hard-working. Cue David trying to get them to loosen up! 'You will never ever get a boss like me again' he pleads). So buy this when it gets release in the UK which is mid-October, check amazon.co.uk for more info.
If you like this then you must buy 'Im Alan Partridge' and 'Phoenix Nights'. Both are loved over here (Alan Partridge is a video diary of a failed TV celebrity forced to do 4-7am Radio shows! He quickly loses the plot. Phoenix Nights is about a pub run by a power crazy madcap businessman, see amazon.co.uk for more!) We recently went through a comedy golden age in the UK when these thress comedies aired in the same weeks!