The Bishop on Extras: season two, episode one
If the first episode is anything to go by, the new season of Ricky Gervais and Steven Merchant’s Extras augers faintly darker than what has come before. The sets, once relatively varied, here consist largely of the sets of the shows-within-the-show themselves; the shadowy, thrown together, do-it-yourself backstage of filmic artifice. The characters, by and large, are either nastier or even more hopeless—not only have they failed to grow, they’ve regressed. The mood is grimmer, the script less cheeky and more matter-of-fact. And if the Andy Millman of season one was David Brent on valium, this is season one’s Andy on more of the same—or maybe coming down: even less congenial, never suffering fools gladly and finding everyone, even himself, a fool. It is as if Gervais and Merchant are saying—ironically, given their own rapid rise to prominence—that failure doesn’t simply end with success.
In fact, this new season of Extras shows that an ending doesn’t always end with an ending, either. The arc, and the gimmick, of the show appeared to burn out—a little too quickly* for the Bishop’s liking—last year: Andy finding his way out of the shadows into the spotlight, Maggie (Ashley Jensen) getting her life together, the two consolidating their friendship and affirming their not-so-bad-after-all dependence on each other. But what Gervais and Merchant have done, cleverly, is fall back on an old idea—in a sense, Extras has now become The Office. Andy’s sitcom is being made, and he discovers that creating art is just as subject to bureaucracy and human failing as pushing paper at Wernham Hogg.
There are not many outward laughs here, but that doesn’t seem to matter. One or two friends of the Bishop found the pair’s first collaboration, The Office, too cringe-inducing to be funny. This is both fair enough and, of course, a matter of taste. But while Extra’s is—in tone—The Office–lite, it is important to come to both programs aware that they were never really meant to be funny; they are—if The Bishop may reclaim a related word made almost useless by those TV Guide–style critics—poignant. They are dramas of their time, because it is only now that we have made enough mistakes in pursuit of dramatic verity that we can build narrative out of not just small victories, but small losses and small draws as well. Few programs stand up to repeated viewings; both these shows demand it. This is not to say there are laughs missed the first time ’round; rather, contrariwise, there are nuances that warrant attention once one has gotten past the broader edge of the comedy.**
If observational sitcom humour entered the baroque phase with Seinfeld, Gervais has taken it into its classical period. Larry David, doing something very similar to this in his Seinfeld follow-up Curb Your Enthusiasm, never quite hits the same chimes of verity, because one is always wanting pull him aside and tell him to shut the hell up. Gervais’s Millman, by contrast, is a man who can’t be shut up, because, like most of us, he has, metaphorically speaking, already stepped in the dog turd and can now only wipe it off or pretend it isn’t there. Gervais is also a much better actor than David. His petulant shrug of the shoulders after being dressed down by his boss is so human you could shake hands with it; and when he walks off behind the ‘set’ in the last minute of this story, head slumped, unhappy with what his sitcom project has become, he is like the anti-Olivier, suggesting not that less is more, or more is less, but just-so is just-so.
If The Office was near enough the best there is at what it did, Extras is not quite so tightly wrought. There is, as with all British TV, a good cast (particular credit to Martin Savage, who plays the BBC Head of Comedy with the calm authority that comes from needing nothing but that calm—and the threat that it might, at any second, break), but Maggie seems as lost as-character as she is in character. Her hapless offsiding is in some sense integral, but became flabbier as last season progressed: neither foil nor counterpoint to Andy, or even mirror, but largely repetition. Here she has little to do apart from serve as psychic punching bag and make Orlando Bloom look a fool—though the latter is probably not such a bad thing to have to do.
There are also implausabilities. Despite its humourous potential, it is hard to see Maggie as the cible d'amour of a desperate Bloom; likewise Shaun ‘Barry’ Williamson’s catering table theft was well timed and amusing, but the stuff of early Simpsons and out of place here. Nonetheless, the Bishop was pleased to discover that Extras has found somewhere to go after so neatly—if hurriedly—wrapping up last year.
*And conveniently: your Lutheran locutor never really bought Andy’s sudden ability to sell his script, the excitement with which it was rushed forward by the BBC, or the idea that they’d cast a patently uncharismatic unknown in the lead. This may be similar to what happened in the creation of The Office, but that was real life, and doesn’t have to make sense. Drama—and even comedy—does.
**Gervais, in the guise of Millman, rails against ‘broad comedy’ in this story—a familiar trope if one has seen Gervais and Merchant speak on the subject. Yet there is broad comedy in both Extras and The Office—indeed, this is the source of most of the actual laughs. Merchant, in particular, with his sym-pathetic goggle eyes and abnormal height, cannot seem to help being broadly hilarious, and would not be out of place in Little Britain or The League of Gentlemen, shows with a style the duo are actively trying to eschew.
In fact, this new season of Extras shows that an ending doesn’t always end with an ending, either. The arc, and the gimmick, of the show appeared to burn out—a little too quickly* for the Bishop’s liking—last year: Andy finding his way out of the shadows into the spotlight, Maggie (Ashley Jensen) getting her life together, the two consolidating their friendship and affirming their not-so-bad-after-all dependence on each other. But what Gervais and Merchant have done, cleverly, is fall back on an old idea—in a sense, Extras has now become The Office. Andy’s sitcom is being made, and he discovers that creating art is just as subject to bureaucracy and human failing as pushing paper at Wernham Hogg.
There are not many outward laughs here, but that doesn’t seem to matter. One or two friends of the Bishop found the pair’s first collaboration, The Office, too cringe-inducing to be funny. This is both fair enough and, of course, a matter of taste. But while Extra’s is—in tone—The Office–lite, it is important to come to both programs aware that they were never really meant to be funny; they are—if The Bishop may reclaim a related word made almost useless by those TV Guide–style critics—poignant. They are dramas of their time, because it is only now that we have made enough mistakes in pursuit of dramatic verity that we can build narrative out of not just small victories, but small losses and small draws as well. Few programs stand up to repeated viewings; both these shows demand it. This is not to say there are laughs missed the first time ’round; rather, contrariwise, there are nuances that warrant attention once one has gotten past the broader edge of the comedy.**
If observational sitcom humour entered the baroque phase with Seinfeld, Gervais has taken it into its classical period. Larry David, doing something very similar to this in his Seinfeld follow-up Curb Your Enthusiasm, never quite hits the same chimes of verity, because one is always wanting pull him aside and tell him to shut the hell up. Gervais’s Millman, by contrast, is a man who can’t be shut up, because, like most of us, he has, metaphorically speaking, already stepped in the dog turd and can now only wipe it off or pretend it isn’t there. Gervais is also a much better actor than David. His petulant shrug of the shoulders after being dressed down by his boss is so human you could shake hands with it; and when he walks off behind the ‘set’ in the last minute of this story, head slumped, unhappy with what his sitcom project has become, he is like the anti-Olivier, suggesting not that less is more, or more is less, but just-so is just-so.
If The Office was near enough the best there is at what it did, Extras is not quite so tightly wrought. There is, as with all British TV, a good cast (particular credit to Martin Savage, who plays the BBC Head of Comedy with the calm authority that comes from needing nothing but that calm—and the threat that it might, at any second, break), but Maggie seems as lost as-character as she is in character. Her hapless offsiding is in some sense integral, but became flabbier as last season progressed: neither foil nor counterpoint to Andy, or even mirror, but largely repetition. Here she has little to do apart from serve as psychic punching bag and make Orlando Bloom look a fool—though the latter is probably not such a bad thing to have to do.
There are also implausabilities. Despite its humourous potential, it is hard to see Maggie as the cible d'amour of a desperate Bloom; likewise Shaun ‘Barry’ Williamson’s catering table theft was well timed and amusing, but the stuff of early Simpsons and out of place here. Nonetheless, the Bishop was pleased to discover that Extras has found somewhere to go after so neatly—if hurriedly—wrapping up last year.
*And conveniently: your Lutheran locutor never really bought Andy’s sudden ability to sell his script, the excitement with which it was rushed forward by the BBC, or the idea that they’d cast a patently uncharismatic unknown in the lead. This may be similar to what happened in the creation of The Office, but that was real life, and doesn’t have to make sense. Drama—and even comedy—does.
**Gervais, in the guise of Millman, rails against ‘broad comedy’ in this story—a familiar trope if one has seen Gervais and Merchant speak on the subject. Yet there is broad comedy in both Extras and The Office—indeed, this is the source of most of the actual laughs. Merchant, in particular, with his sym-pathetic goggle eyes and abnormal height, cannot seem to help being broadly hilarious, and would not be out of place in Little Britain or The League of Gentlemen, shows with a style the duo are actively trying to eschew.
posted by Salisbury at 12:13 pm
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