The Office: A sort of conjecture about why some US sitcoms are the way they are.

People here often ask me what part of England I grew up in, which isn’t a particularly easy question – I was born in the north, but then lived in South Wales and then various place in the South all of which were west of London. Oxford is sort of familiar to everyone (though not my part of it), Aylesbury to no-one, and Slough… well, on Friday the person I was chatting with stole my usual line, which is “The British version of The Office is set in Slough, and that tells you a lot about the place”. He told the leader of our research project that she should watch the British version because it is much better than the American version.

Personally, I think the British version is, indeed, brilliant. Because of that I was excited to watch the first few episodes of the America version when it came out, and found it almost unbearable. I expected it to fail, as I think most sitcoms that move from the UK to the US do. In fact, though, it transformed itself and succeeded. And I admired the writers and the star, Steve Carell, for understanding how to make that happen.

The Office falls in a specific category of British sitcom that is particularly difficult to replicate in the US: the sitcom that revolves around somebody who is, basically, a monster. The prototype is Hancock’s Half Hour. Although Hancock is not, himself, quite a monster, the character Galton and Simpson went onto create, Albert Steptoe, is – utterly selfish, wantonly cruel to his trapped son Harold (one of the genius aspects of Absolutely Fabulous is that Saffy is written with more than a nod to Harold Steptoe except that we know, for sure, that Saffy will, eventually, get out[1]), really unbearable.

Subsequently: Alf Garnett in Til Death Us Do Part, Rigsby in Rising Damp, arguably Captain Mainwairing in Dad’s Army, Basil (but also to some extent Sybil [2]) in Fawlty Towers, Eddie Booth in Love Thy Neighbour, Victor Meldrew in One Foot In the Grave and… David Brent in The Office. Of course, few of them are quite completely unbearable [3], but, interestingly given what I’m about to say, Steptoe and Garnett are truly awful, as is David Brent.

The traditional US TV sitcom does not allow for complete monsters to dominate a show. I can only think of one American sitcom I’ve watched a lot of with a thoroughly unlikeable central character, and even in that case he seems to have been written with an aim to please, just not to please me.[4] Are there other examples of network sitcoms where somebody thoroughly unpleasant dominates?

Not All In the Family, Sanford and Son, or The Office, all of them direct copies of British shows. What salvaged The Office was that the writers and Steve Carell learned the lesson from All In The Family and Sanford and Son, that American audiences cannot tolerate a complete monster dominating. Archie Bunker is pretty terrible, but not heartless, or at least nowhere near as heartless as Garnett; Fred Sanford is softer, warmer to the audience, and funnier than Albert Steptoe; and Lamont is a less despairing, and desperate, character than Harold.[5] If you’ve watched Sanford and Son or All in the Family, and what I am saying sounds implausible, that’s because you haven’t watched enough of the English shows on which they are based.

Some Brits think that the lack of monsters at the center of American sitcoms reveals a defect in American taste. My theory is that it reflects two (related) differences between the US and the UK that shape rather than reflect taste.

The first is that in the UK sitcoms are, and always have been, made in 6-8 episode tranches, whereas network TV sitcoms were made in seasons of 30 or more up to the late 1960s, and 20-26 subsequently. The aim for the US was to get a show into syndication, which required 80-100 episodes; and once in syndication the show would be on every bloody day of the week.[6] Even Americans can enjoy watching a monster tormenting their families for 6 to 8 weeks; even Brits couldn’t stand it week in, week out for most of a year, let alone daily. The monster had to be tamed not for the Americans but for anyone watching that many episodes.

The second, related, fact is that American sitcoms are written by multiple people, whereas British sitcoms have mostly been written by individuals or pairs (Galton and Simpson, Cleese and Booth, Clement and La Frenais, Perry and Croft, Saunders (and Wax?), Speight, Gervais and Merchant). Obviously: even if they could write 30 episodes a year, most of them would find it hard to write a monster week in week out [7][8]; more tellingly, it seems to me that it would be hard to maintain the monstrousness without a very strong consensus in favour, which is harder to achieve when lots of writers are collaborating. I’d love to hear from people with experience in writers’ rooms about whether this is accurate.

So I do, personally, prefer the UK to the US Office, and not only because of the Slough connection. But what the US writers did, and especially what Carell did, in softening and humanizing Michael Scott was both brilliant and necessary, reflecting, it seems to me, the different structures they inhabit, not some deep difference in cultural tastes. [9]

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[1] Are Eddie and Patsy monsters? I’m not sure – maybe because there are two of them? Somewhere on the internet someone said that Elizabeth Mainwairing is a monster, which seems a bit unkind, given that she never appears onscreen; it was never clear to me that she even actually existed. Hyacinth Bucket, maybe? Frances De La Tour is brilliant, and, ironically given her role in Rising Damp, somewhat monstrous, in Big School, which I find utterly hilarious (Big School, not the irony).

[2] One wonderful thing about Fawlty Towers is how we do feel sympathy for Sybil, because it must be awful to be married to Basil, but also for Basil because it must be awful being married to Sybil.

[3] Presumably PhD theses have been written about Eddie Booth, or if there haven’t been there should have been, though maybe nobody with modern sensibilities could stand to watch all 53 episodes. I heard the other day that the writers of Love Thy Neighbour also wrote for The Fosters (the UK’s first black sitcom), but I can’t find evidence of that on the web. One of them did write for Mind Your Language, which is almost as notorious as Love Thy Neighbour despite, I gather, also intending to skewer rather than promote the attitudes displayed.

[4] Seinfeld. It’s easy to see the parallels between Seinfeld and Hancock when they’re pointed out: Seinfeld is (a more self-satisfied version of) Hancock, George is (an unlikeable and charmless version of) Bill, Elaine is (an unsympathetic but interesting version of) Moira or Andree (but not Miss Pugh), Kramer is (a stupider and unloveable version of) Sid.

[5] As I said, we are certain that Saffy will eventually get out; Harold is stuck till death do them part. In Lamont’s case we aren’t certain, but we think he probably will.

[6] I haven’t checked but I doubt that any of the UK sitcoms I’ve mentioned has more than the 80 episodes of Dad’s Army, and most have substantially fewer.

[7] It’s notable that despite his generally arse-y public persona, Gervais’s subsequent characters are all quite a bit softer and more human than Brent; indeed, some are rather delightful. Speight, I suspect, is the one person who could have written monsters forever, but maybe even he would have mellowed with age.

[8] Gina asked me if there are any examples of sitcoms that have failed in transposition to the US because their writers determinedly kept the monstrousness in. I don’t know of examples. There were three failed attempts to transpose Fawlty Towers, one of which probably didn’t fail from retaining the monstrousness because it wrote Basil out! I find it hard to imagine any world in which monstrousness rather than complete lack of any folk memory of a home defense force would be the cause of the failure of an attempt to transpose Dad’s Army – the few minutes of (the only episode of) The Rear Guard that I have seen seem to depend on a startlingly thoroughgoing sexism and attempts to make the voices of The Hair Bear Bunch sound refined and their scripts sound Shakespearian.

[9] I don’t know why I’m feeling defensive about this but, despite appearing to be a thoroughgoing English chauvinist, I love and have watched all or most episodes of many American sitcoms including but not limited to The Monkees, The Munsters, Bilko, the Dick Van Dyke Show, the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, Alice, The Partridge Family, Wait ‘Til Your Father Gets Home (a minor masterpiece), WKRP in Cincinnati, Family Ties, Roseanne, M*A*S*H, Eight is Enough, Bewitched, Taxi, One Day at a Time, Cheers, Newhart, The Bob Newhart Show, The Jeffersons, Good Times and, believe it or not (yes, you probably can believe it) I prefer Three’s Company to Man About the House. I even like those weird ones in which a family tries to live normally despite having a wise-cracking alien puppet living with them or a fat Englishman trapped in their kitchen. Don’t get me started on radio sitcoms like Our Miss Brooks, The Halls of Ivy, Gildersleeve…