Sorry, online haters, but The Office Australia is genuinely fun

The Office
★★ ★ ½
Amazon Prime

I’ll concede I was sniffy about the prospect of a local iteration of the British “cringe” comedy, The Office. Especially more than two decades after the original. But then, I was suspicious of the US version, which went on to run for 201 episodes, compared with 12 for Ricky Gervais’ groundbreaking mockumentary.

Prime Video’s version is the 13th interpretation of the global franchise and the first to flip the gender roles and have a woman as the deluded middle manager. You likely know all this, given the coverage the series has had in the past few months. And, somewhat unfairly, the slamming it’s already had on social media, based solely on last month’s trailer.

Felicity Ward and Edith Poor as Hannah Howard and Lizzie Moyle in the The Office.

Developed for Australia by writer Julie De Fina (co-creator of Aftertaste) and New Zealand actor, writer and director Jackie van Beek (The Breaker Upperers, The Educators), the Australian Office follows the Gervais template – a documentary crew filming everyday office life – but with an Australian sensibility, and updated for the 21st-century workplace.

Flinley (“not Finley”) Craddick is a mediocre packaging company in an outer Sydney suburb, run by Hannah Howard, and sorry haters, but Felicity Ward is perfect for the role. She nails the eager-to-be-liked while happy-to-walk-over-her-employees energy of Gervais’ original character. Not as nasty as David Brent, Hannah is not quite the gentle doofus of Steve Carell’s Michael either; she’s somewhere between the two, the kind of incompetent but zany woman we’ve all worked with at some point.

Ward with the cast of The Office.Credit: Prime Video

Hannah’s assistant is also a woman, the tightly wound Lizzie, played by Kiwi actor Edith Poor (The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power), who has a pet crow (Russell) as her “unemotional support animal”. The other character templates remain largely the same – Shari Sebbens as Greta and Steen Raskopoulos as Nick are the localised flirtatious mates who could be more; Deborah (Lucy Schmidt) is the accountant who barely conceals her disdain for everything; Martin (Josh Thomson) is the sensible HR manager and Lloyd (What We Do In The Shadows’ Jonny Brugh) is a standout as the weirdo that nobody wants to get stuck with, who is secretly living in the storeroom as the commute from Woy Woy is killing him.

The overarching storyline across the eight episodes is that head office wants to shut down Hannah’s branch and move everyone to remote work, but Hannah is determined to keep her “work family” together; in this sense, there’s an underlying poignancy to her, which even Gervais’ David Brent exhibited. Like Brent, it’s mostly overshadowed by a delusional self-confidence. Ward’s Hannah also likes to see herself as a “girlboss” feminist role model. “My back hurts from carrying all my sisters,” she says at one point, mugging for the camera.

There are lots of Australia-specific moments – Melbourne Cup day, an ill-advised “away day” at a dodgy reptile park in some bloke’s backyard – and workforce jokes that differ from those in the 2001 original, such as Hannah’s cynical attempt at office “diversity”. It might jar at first, but stick with it; it’s genuinely funny. It’s not groundbreaking, but it was never intended to be.

Yes, we “already have Utopia”, as social media posters have said, but in a world where TV workplaces tend to be “important” – ER wards, politicians’ offices, glossy publishing houses – The Office has always been a celebration of the kinds of “ordinary” lives many of us lead.

And the fact that this is another series written and led by women (along with recent international hits Colin From Accounts, Fisk and Deadloch) is not to be sniffed at.

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