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The Office - The Complete First SeriesRating:
Release Date: 07 October, 2003 Retail Price: $29.98 OUR Price: $23.98 You SAVE: $6.00! Cast: Complete Cast (6 total) |
The Office - The Complete First Series Reviews
Awesome !! Hilarious !! Buy It !!
When the American version of the BBC "The Office" was first shown on NBC, I watched it with guarded enthusiasm...I had heard so much hoopla about the British series, I was hesitant. It was good..quite good, really, and it only peaked my interest to view the original British version. Glad I did ! It is far far superior ~ the humour dry, witty and clever beyond belief.
Do yourself a favour ~ and order this DVD...you'll be glad you did. I have just ordered the second series and hopefully will enjoy it as much !!
Self-Alienation as Slapstick
I bought a used copy of the popular BBC first series of "The Office" after hearing much about it and listening to an interview with its creator, Ricky Gervais, last year on NPR. The themes are similar to those explored by Gary Schandling, Christopher Guest, and Larry David: the daily misadventures of a self-esteem cripple whose engagement with his world and his grand perceptions of himself in it are deluded to a point bordering on psychosis.
But unlike these American counterparts, "the Office" is somehow darker. The audience is plunged more directly into a claustrophobic office nihilism where everyone is susceptible to suffering a fool whose position of power and demands for narcissistic mirroring become a menacing burden. The show plays up the awkward unease that colleagues and bystanders must endure with this insufferable Mr. Brent and his ghastly open narcissistic sores. It strikes me as postmodern slapstick-instead of Chevy Chase pratfalls of physical comedy from earlier, less complicated times, the audience here enters into to the grotesque maladaptive existence of an alienated "as if" personality, who knows nothing about his internal life, cannot meaningfully connect or relate to others in his world, and is so fractured that he cannot even be informed by his own feelings of shame and guilt. We see in each episode Mr. Brent, and sometimes his assistant "team leader" Gareth, seeking out connections with others in the hopes of validation of an ego ideal that is impossibly at variance with the real limits of who they are. The tragic result is an interpersonal atmosphere of growing estrangement and bad karma that only further exacerbates the cycle of Mr. Brent's pathological quest.
I give this series five stars not only because it makes me laugh but because it is powerful art. Good art, in my view, is provocatively unsettling in it depiction of the life we all know. "The Office" illuminates something about the present human condition that perhaps most of us can identify within ourselves: a growing struggle for significance and meaning in a world where the bar for acceptance seems to be continually raised and the accepting embrace of an affirming community is harder and harder to come by. We can both identify with Mr. Brent and project our own disowned insecurities onto him and his hapless cohorts. Hopefully through it we can take perspective through humor at what is so elusively frightful about our existence. But hopefully, also, we can eventually come to feel a sense of compassion and sensitivity toward the David Brent in all of us. When this happens, this style of psychological slapstick will probably become finished business in the same way physical slapstick has. Or will it? There are no signs on the horizon that we are evolving beyond instincts of petty self-aggrandizement and seeking esteemed status in the eyes of others at any cost.
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