What happens when an Australian woman takes over The Office?

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There was no question of WFH in David Brent’s day. Imagine it. What is the point of ruling an empire if nobody’s there? For Brent, the office was the fiefdom where he saw himself as the boy king; for Steve Carell’s Michael Scott, it was a boisterous playground where all the other kids had to be nice to him.

Now, for Hannah Howard, boss of Australia’s fourth-largest packaging company’s Sydney office, it is home and family. Previous bosses were threatened with a merger of branches, which meant being subsumed into someone else’s regime. For Hannah (Felicity Ward), the threat is being doomed to run her show over Zoom — or, as she calls it, house arrest.

Twenty-three years after Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant wrote The Office, a game-changing mockumentary about office life laced with tripwire tension, unnerving silences and the breathtaking unpleasantness of Gervais’s wheedling anti-hero, the big news for many old Office hands is that this latest incarnation is led by a woman. There have been 12 previous remakes, set everywhere from Finland to Saudi Arabia. Carell’s version was the third; it ran to nine seasons. The question of which was better — the bleak English or upbeat American — still bubbles away on fan sites, but it has never ruffled feathers half as much as the notion that, with a woman on top, The Office is “going woke”. (Ward has wryly reassured people that “Ricky Gervais has approved a female lead . . . just in case anyone is angry.”)

Australia’s version is, in fact, women’s work: the executive producer (Kylie Washington) and producer (Sophia Zachariou) are women, the writers (Julie de Fina and Jackie van Beek) are women, many of the episodes are directed by women and stand-up comedian and actor Ward has put lipstick on the face of managerial incompetence.

The humiliation and bullying that got a laugh in 2001 — such as taunting a young woman with dick jokes — might not get that laugh now

But as far as bossing goes, that doesn’t change anything. Hannah’s gender is simply an accepted fact, not much mentioned. In line with the programme’s long-standing framework, she is conniving, pathetically desperate to be popular and the kind of Class A idiot who pretends to sack people to make herself look tough to head office. On the other hand, she doesn’t set out to make anyone cry.

Is this because women are nicer? Surely, having women in charge is no longer so remarkable that anyone could hang on to that delusion. This is about the passage of time: where we’re at post-Covid and post-MeToo.

Hannah is a klutz, but not actively cruel. The staff still prank each other, but there are no elaborately mean practical jokes, no staplers set into dishes of lemon jelly. Other social norms have been tweaked, too. Nobody goes to the pub or brags of how drunk they got last night and possibly still are. Instead, they eat — pizzas, tacos, the inevitable Australian sausage sizzle. What do you do for fun? Hannah asks the slick intern, a little too eagerly. “Um . . . order food,” says the intern. It’s not quite what Gordon Gekko meant when he said greed was good.

Most significantly, the humiliation and bullying that got a laugh in 2001 — such as taunting a young woman with dick jokes — might not get that laugh now. Maybe David Brent would still have gone there — because the point of Brent was that he would go anywhere. Hannah’s speciality is the off-kilter and off-colour: asking indigenous sales rep Greta to perform a traditional “welcome to country” ritual at a wake and bridling when she says no. This is why, she says pompously, progress is so difficult.

Does that mean The Office has lost its edge? Maybe, but any office without Gervais’s poisonous leering is going to look like a picnic by comparison. Paul Feig has said that it took Steve Carell, an inherently endearing screen presence, until season two of the American Office to make his character likeable. After that, the series developed emotional ups and downs in tandem with the jokes that brought it into line with any number of other sitcoms, which may be why it lasted so long.

Hannah isn’t there yet and, given the sledging the series has already received at home, she may not get a chance to be anything but pitiably awful. But therein lies the difference. It might be possible to pity David Brent but nobody could truly like him, even from the safe distance of WFH.

On Amazon Prime Video from October 18

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