Imagine if, contrary to the wishes of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the BBC had continued making The Office all these years. This Christmas, the Beeb might announce, the Slough branch of Wernham Hogg could expect a very special treat: a visit from Steve Coogan, Billie Piper and Bella Emberg!
It's not a pleasant thought. Yet that is more or less the position that fans of the US version of the sitcom find themselves in following this week's announcement that Jack Black, Jessica Alba and Cloris Leachman are shooting cameos for next February's Super Bowl episode. In other words, the NBC show has jumped the shark.
When a US take on The Office was announced in 2004, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth – understandably enough, given the generally dismal results when British sitcoms transfer to American television. But there were also plenty of reasons for optimism. Its embrace of the original series' lo-fi approach – all awkward faux pas with no laugh track – was a truly bold gambit for a major network. And the American work environment is a higher-stakes setting than its British counterpart, loaded with more aggression and vulnerability and therefore offering more potential for dark humour.
For NBC, the gamble paid off: at least in the sense that The Office became one of their most successful shows, even as it broached taboo subjects like race, gender and class. Midway through its fifth season, it is arguably the funniest live-action sitcom on American TV, with sharp gags and engaging performances. Increasingly, however, these come at the expense of the genuinely cringe-making and tear-jerking elements that made the BBC series so powerful.
By maintaining a plausibly banal, enervating atmosphere, the original show wrung emotional credibility from nuanced events. By contrast, recent episodes of the NBC show have juggled four office romances and a (sort-of) wedding, as well as blackmail, a drug bust and an attempt to force someone into rehab.
In short, as the show has gone on, its humour has become broader, its jokes bigger. The announcement of star casting would seem to be a tipping point, telling us a great deal about both what the network wants to include in the show and what it doesn't.
Celebrity cameos have long fascinated Gervais and Merchant but they (usually) get away with it through canny contextualisation: Howard from the Halifax ads and Bubble from Big Brother added a naff authenticity to David Brent's fame-chasing in The Office Christmas Special, while Extras was explicitly about showbiz, performance and identity. Black, Alba and Leachman will reportedly appear in the US show at one remove, as stars of a movie the regular characters are trying to download, but the gambit still smacks of the shameless celebrity cameo as parodied on Extras when Chris Martin appears in the series-within-a-series When the Whistle Blows.
While NBC concentrates on big-name novelty gags, it's missing a historic opportunity. Despite occasional nods to the tooth-and-claw aspects of the American workplace (one episode saw employees' healthcare insurance placed in jeopardy) the show has seldom exploited the potential of this environment.
The current season began in September, when the American economy entered a crisis that has only deepened and worsened as the weeks go by. In the context of US pop culture, The Office has unique potential to engage – satirically, perhaps cathartically – with this seismic challenge to American society while remaining faithful to its basic premise. Instead, it's wheeling out A-listers, putting its regular characters in crrrazy fur coats and, in this week's episode, setting their hair on fire. Meanwhile, Rome is burning.
