more than 4 million DVDs and catching
fire with audiences beyond U.K. shores.
Set in the dreary town of Slough,
England, the meticulous portrait of
workplace tedium, insecurity and latent
depravity starred Gervais as David Brent,
the pitifully self-inflated middle manager
of a paper company. He was a transfixing spectacle of awkward bravado and
inappropriate conduct—a royal putz
of a guy who, acutely aware of the faux-documentary’s camera, was desperate to
impress more than just his employees with
his off-color jokes and bungled truisms.
The ensemble cast was equally vivid, both
in its aversion to David Brent and its own
moronic and degenerate behavior.
Reaching across the Atlantic, the
series won two Golden Globe awards and
rare critical reverence. It’s not often that
you see a top TV critic gushing like this:
“Nobody who has seen the BBC series The
Office has anything bad to say about it, and
there’s a reason for that: It’s perfect,” wrote
The New Yorker ’s Nancy Franklin in October 2004. “It’s a comedy that doesn’t make
you laugh, and at times it is close to unbearable; some people like it so much that they
can’t watch it. That’s how good it is.”
But although the show found a strong
cult following here, Gervais is hardly a
household name in America. Survey the
pop-culturally savvy in, say, New York or
San Francisco, and you’ll find devotees. But mention
The Office to most American TV viewers and you’re likely
to hear only about NBC’s hit spinoff of the same name,
set in Scranton, Pa., and starring funnyman Steve Carell.
Ricky Gervais? Who the hell is he?
The man who inadvertently put Scranton on the
map (he’s an executive producer of the NBC version)
followed a circuitous path to stardom. Gervais, now 46,
grew up in a suburb of Reading, in southern England.
In the early 1980s he attended University College
“I LIKE THE ROMANCE OF DOING
STAND-UP. IT’S THE LAST
BASTION OF SELF-CENSORSHIP
OUTSIDE THE NOVEL.”
Top: Gervais found fame
with The Office. Below: His
HBO show Extras attracted
such guest stars as Kate
Winslet, David Bowie,
Robert De Niro
and Daniel Radcliffe.
London, where he studied biology and philosophy
and met his longtime girlfriend, TV producer Jane
Fallon. He played in a pop group that blipped briefly
on the U.K. charts, worked various odd jobs (
including in an office, of course) and got into music and
entertainment management.
By the mid-1990s Gervais landed a job at London
radio station Xfm, where he and Stephen Merchant first
met. The two began writing sketches together, incubating what would become the demo for The Office.
Gervais describes a rare creative partnership with
Merchant. “Stephen and I trust each other so much.
We never put anything in unless we both want it,”
he says. “There’s no compromise, really. It feels like
I’m always getting my own way, and maybe he feels
the same.” To anyone who has ever collaborated on
creating anything, this sounds farfetched—until you
rewatch The Office, a series so well crafted that every
detail, from an actor’s glance to the grace note of a
clacking copy machine, counts.
“We wanted every word and nuance to be real and
to mean something,” says Gervais. “I’ve seen so much
stuff that’s been ruined by writers getting carried away
with getting a good joke in. We threw jokes on the floor
if they made someone look too clever or undermined
the story.”
