What happens when an Australian woman takes over The Office?

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In David Brent’s time there was no talk of working from home. Imagine it. What’s the point of ruling an empire if there’s no one 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 bustling playground where all the other kids had to be nice to him.

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

Twenty-three years after Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant wrote the officea game-changing mockumentary about office life mixed with trap tension, unsettling silences and the impressive discomfort of Gervais’s conniving antihero, big news for many old men 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 lasted nine seasons. The question of who was better, the gloomy Englishman or the optimistic American, is still debated on fan sites, but it has never irritated as much as the idea that, with a woman at the top, the office is “waking up”. (Ward has wryly assured people that “Ricky Gervais has approved a female lead… just in case anyone is mad.”)

The Australian version is, in fact, the work of women: 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 Comedian and actor Ward has put lipstick on management incompetence.

The humiliation and harassment that drew laughter in 2001, such as mocking a young woman with penis jokes, might not draw as much laughter now.

But when it comes to commanding, that doesn’t change anything. Hannah’s gender is simply an accepted fact, not mentioned much. In keeping with the show’s long-standing framework, she’s scheming, pathetically desperate to be popular, and the kind of Class A jerk who aims to fire people to look tough to the bosses. On the other hand, it is not intended to make anyone cry.

Is this because women are nicer? Surely, having women in charge is no longer so extraordinary that someone can cling to that illusion. It’s about the passage of time: where we are post-Covid and post-MeToo.

Hannah is clumsy, but not actively cruel. The staff still play pranks on each other, but there are no elaborate practical jokes, no staplers placed in plates of lemon Jello. Other social norms have also changed. Nobody goes to the pub and brags about how drunk they were last night and possibly still are. Instead, they eat pizzas, tacos and the inevitable Australian sausage. What do you do for fun? Hannah asks the skilled intern, a little too enthusiastically. “Hey. . . order food,” says the intern. That’s not exactly what Gordon Gekko meant when he said greed was good.

Most significantly, the humiliation and harassment that drew laughter in 2001, such as mocking a young woman with penis jokes, might not draw that laugh now. Maybe David Brent would still have gone there, because Brent’s goal was that he would go anywhere. Hannah’s specialty is the off-kilter and off-color: asking Indigenous sales rep Greta to perform a traditional “welcome to country” ritual at a wake and getting angry when she says no. That’s why, he says pompously, progress is so difficult.

Does that mean the office Has it lost its edge? Maybe, but any office without Gervais’ venomous leers will seem like a picnic in comparison. Paul Feig has said that it took Steve Carell, an inherently endearing on-screen presence, until the second season of American Office to make his character likable. After that, the series developed emotional highs and lows along with jokes that aligned it with many other sitcoms, which may be why it lasted so long.

Hannah isn’t quite there yet, and given the sledgehammer the series has already received at home, she may not get the chance to be anything other than pitifully awful. But therein lies the difference. It might be possible to feel sorry for David Brent, but no one could really like him, not even from the safe distance of the WFH.

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