BBC's The Office v. NBC's The Office
 

If you managed to catch The Office pilot on NBC tonight - what did you think?

I'm a huge fan of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant and the British version of the show - which is absolutely hysterical. The American version is exactly the cheap knockoff that I thought it would be - but I think it would be likely to think that after seeing the original.

Why mess with a good thing?

I thought it was reasonably well done. Not as good as the original, but better than most American sitcoms. It will only be really possible to judge the quality when they run out of BBC scripts to follow and have to write their own.

I haven't seen any of the BBC episodes, although I would like to.
I enjoyed last night's NBC version. It was far better than most network TV.

great, they're fucking the corpse of another great idea.

The question is whether the resulting zombie baby will be more like "All in the Family" or "Coupling [american]".

I had to watch my BBC The Office DVDs today... they really ruined the whole jello/stapler bit in the American one. It seemed awkward and forced.

Yeah, they didn't have the bit where the Gareth-equivalent mentioned that he didn't trust jello, which explains why the Tim-equivalent chose that particular prank. But the pun bit afterwards was handled well.

The bit that fell flattest for me was the Hitler impersonation.

Actually, the preview of next week looks like it has a funny diversity-training scene that's not copied from the BBC version. Could be good, could be over the top.

This week's episode - Diversity Training - was awkward and unfunny. I'm sorry, but you can't beat David Brent at the Customer Service training whipping out the guitar.

Sums it up really.

I'll stick with this asessment for the time being. If I could only watch American sitcoms that were as good as the best of the BBC exports, I'd only watch Arrested Development and Scrubs. As it is, I watch Arrested Development, Scrubs, and the Office.

Arrested Development is great!

I agree, Arrested Development is great. I stopped watching Scrubs when they switched it from Tuesday nights, but I always enjoyed it.

Over the weekend, I reserved the public library's copy of BBC's The Office. I'm something like the 27th person on the wait list, but they have 5 copies, and you can only keep it for a week, so I should have it in a month or so. Then I'll have a marathon session of watching all the episodes in one week. I think I'll stop watching the NBC version until then.

Did you mean "switched to Tuesday nights"? Because, conveniently to me, Scrubs and the Office are now the Tuesday 9:00 hour on NBC.

We don't make English Friends. We don't make English Simpsons. Why oh why would they do such a thing? I refuse to believe that the American public at large (sorry) is more stupid than the fat football obsessed glued-to-the-sofa British masses, so what's going on? NBC want to claim tax returns on 'adaptation'? Ffs.

It is a fact that Hollywood executives don't think that Americans are willing to listen to a foreign accent unless the character is a villain or a "fish out of water". But there are some cash reasons for a remake:

It is better to sell syndication rights than to buy them.

Two seasons of the BBC Office and the Christmas special totalled just over half of a season of an American TV series.