ASSISTANT REGIONAL MANAGER

Why ‘The Office’ Makes Its Original Star ‘Cringe’

The star of the original U.K. version of “The Office” also told “Obsessed: The Podcast” that he thought the American adaptation was a terrible idea.

Mackenzie Crook struggles with awkward comedy.

“I don’t enjoy cringy humor,” he told Obsessed: The Podcast. “I think you can be cleverer than that.”

That might seem odd for Crook, 55, who first broke through playing The Office’s socially incompetent Gareth Keenan—the original U.K. version’s inspiration for Rainn Wilson’s Dwight Schrute—but the Pirates of the Caribbean star said it’s just not his thing.

The hit sitcom ran for two seasons starting in 2001 on BBC Two, with Ricky Gervais helming the mockumentary as David Brent, the tone-deaf, insecure regional manager of a paper company. Gareth was the unofficial “assistant to the regional manager,” approaching his made-up role with grave seriousness.

Despite a slow start, the comedy became the first non-U.S. sitcom to win a Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series—Musical or Comedy in 2004. The same year, Ricky Gervais became the first British actor to take home the Globe for Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series—Musical or Comedy.

Crook, who created and currently stars in the Apple TV comedy Small Prophets, said he’s not sure The Office would have the same success today. The series’ most cringeworthy moments hinged upon pointing out real-life dubious workplace practices. Now, Crook said the kind of blatant bigotry featured in the show is largely absent from professional environments.

“There’s some really uncomfortable moments, but it was always flagging up this bad behavior,” Crook said. “The only reason I think that possibly The Office couldn’t be made now is because that behavior doesn’t exist so much anymore in those environments. It’s been stamped out, probably not completely, but that sort of sexism or that sort of casual racism or bigotry, that just doesn’t happen anymore.”

He added that the dynamics The Office exposed “wouldn’t be realistic these days,” especially because he thinks people would “call out” real-life perpetrators. Workplaces now are more likely to address microaggressions and power imbalances; as a result, The Office would feel less resonant, Crook said.

“It’s a product of its time and a fascinating document of how people used to behave and things that people got away with back in those days,” he said.

THE LAST LAUGH

Rainn Wilson: ‘The Office’ Was ‘Jaw-Droppingly’ Offensive

Matt Wilstein

The Office U.K. inspired the wildly popular American version starring Steve Carell, which ran for 9 seasons from 2005 to 2013. But when he heard about the U.S. series, Crook wasn’t thrilled.

“I didn’t like the idea, just because I felt so proud of what we’d done,” he said. “I thought, ‘Why can’t the rest of the world enjoy our version?’”

“I’ve since, of course, made peace with that,” he added.

Crook has since realized that the shows were far from identical. His concerns over Hollywood co-opting and creating a carbon copy of the original Office never came to fruition.

“It wasn’t a copy, and so I needn’t have been worried,” Crook said. “But yeah, at the time it felt really odd. I remember predicting that one day I’d come across someone who wouldn’t even be aware that there was an original British version. And of course, most of the world doesn’t know there was an original British version!”

Over a decade after the British Office ended, Crook wrote, directed, and starred in three seasons of the acclaimed comedy-drama series Detectorists. The show ran from 2014 to 2017 and followed two friends and members of the fictional Danebury Metal Detecting Club in north Essex, England. Crook said the tone was an intentional departure from the brashness of The Office.

“In honesty, Detectorists was an exercise in trying to come up with something uncynical that wasn’t relying on that cruelty of humor, but not in any way supposed to be an antidote to Ricky’s stuff,” Crook said. “I’m a big Ricky Gervais fan. I owe him a lot, and I think he’s a very funny man. So he wasn’t trying to prove anything as far as that’s concerned. But I suppose The Office did have a warm heart at its center, even though it got a lot of laughs from that cruelty or awkward humor.”

Small Prophets, Crook’s current project, also strikes a different tone than The Office, relying on a quieter, gentler type of comedy. The series follows a gruff man named Michael Sleep as he tries to create magical, all-knowing prophesying spirits after his partner Clea disappears. Where The Office was heavy-handed and blaring, Small Prophets contains a whimsical subtlety.

“I enjoy a whole range of different comedies, but I think what I’m best at creating, best at writing, is this more thoughtful comedy-drama, I suppose,” Crook said. “There isn’t laugh-a-minute; it isn’t a roller coaster of hilarity. It’s more gently paced, with some pathos and poignancy as well.”

All six episodes of Small Prophets are currently streaming on Apple TV.

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Dana Herrnstadt Editorial Intern, Obsessed

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