Review of Amazon Prime Video's new remake

Do we need another English language version of The Office? 

That might be the obvious question to ask before embarking  on a new remake with an Australian team, but it’s not one Amazon seems to have considered. 

Nor, indeed, have they apparently asked how they could put a distinctive spin on Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s original, 23 years on and with their once-revolutionary low-key mockumentary style now showing its age.

Instead, this antipodean project is a virtual photocopy of the original, from the knowing glances to camera to the beige colour palate. 

To be fair, it’s a mistake the Americans made, too – Steve Carell’s first episode was an almost line-by-line version of a British script – until eventually finding their own beats. Whether a streaming platform needing instant numbers will have the same patience as a broadcast network which needs long-running hits remains to be seen.

The key difference is that this is the first of any of the 13 international versions to have a female ‘David Brent’, with comedian Felicity Ward playing Hannah Howard, boss of packaging company Flinley Craddick. 

She does a fine job conveying her unsuitability for a managerial position, with desperate, nervous energy and a talent for comically unsubtle facial expressions, such as her disgust at the head-office idea of shutting the office and getting everyone to work from home, shattering her everything.

To head off this tragedy, she instead suggests getting everyone into the building full-time to boost productivity. She deludedly believes her staff will love the idea and when her boss Alisha (Pallavi Sharda) says ‘if anyone complains you’re not to blame it on head office’, we all know exactly what she’ll do at the first sign of dissent. Because that’s what David Brent would do…

The comedy works, just about, but is so derivative that the effect is greatly diluted.

And while it makes no difference that the boss character is female, the gender reversal does diminish the sidekick character of Lizzie, as played by Edith Poor, as the pseudo-machismo and fragile male ego was so crucial to what made Mackenzie Crook’s Gareth such a wonderfully pathetic figure. She’s closer to Rainn Wilson’s power-crazed Dwight Schrute, but there can be only one winner in the comparison that invites.

Comic Steen Raskopoulos plays the Tim/Jim character  Nick with a straight bat, but the chemistry between him and Shari Sebbens’s Greta, the receptionist with an awful boyfriend, is muted. It certainly doesn’t match the Jim-Pam or Tim-Dawn dynamic that gave the previous versions their momentum.  

It’s not that The Office Australia can’t escape the shadow of the BBC original, but that it doesn’t seem to try especially hard.

Taken in isolation, this show would be an auspicious prospect. There’s a decent showing of funny lines and scenes – Hannah improvising a eulogy in episode 2 based only on the deceased colleague’s driving licence is fun – as well as a decent ensemble of solid comedy characters. Jonny Brugh as sad-sack IT guy Lloyd Kneath looks especially promising.

Plenty of fans will tune into the first episode out of pure curiosity. How many stick with it is the trickier question –whether viewers and Amazon bean-counters alike will give the show the space to evolve into its own entity, rather than the pale imitation of its predecessors it too often is at the moment.

Review date: 18 Oct 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett