Ricky Gervais writes people who cannot tell how badly a conversation is going, and films them like a documentary. With Stephen Merchant he made two comedies about embarrassment that hold up; the later series are gentler, and not everyone calls that progress.
Fi1m perspective
David Brent tells a joke and nobody laughs, so he explains it, and somebody at the next desk looks at the camera. That look is the whole method of The Office (2001). Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant let a man carry on believing an encounter is going well long after everyone else has stopped, and they make the camera a witness whose opinion he minds about. We laughed at Brent and then felt mean about it, because those glances make us accomplices in watching him fail. Gervais has been writing versions of that moment ever since.
He came to television sideways, from music and from XFM, the radio station where he met Merchant. Together they created, wrote and directed The Office for BBC Two from 2001 to 2003 and Extras from 2005 to 2007, and the two series share a subject: people who want to be looked at and dread being looked at closely. Andy Millman in Extras is Brent with a little more self-knowledge and no more luck. The format travelled, and Gervais holds writing credits on the American The Office (2005) and on The Simpsons, though neither is where his stamp shows. Later came The Invention of Lying (2009), his first feature as writer-director, then Life's Too Short (2011), Derek (2012) and After Life (2019), which turn towards kindness and grief.
The mockumentary suits him because his best writing lives in the gap between how a man thinks he is coming across and how he is. Merchant's shared direction lets the cast look unprepared; a glance held a beat too long would announce the joke, and they usually stop a beat before. Extras adds a second trick, celebrities playing foolish versions of themselves, and Kate Winslet and Daniel Radcliffe take the humiliation as willingly as any of the regulars. What keeps that series from curdling is Ashley Jensen's Maggie Jacobs. We were more saddened than we expected by her fear that she was wasting her life, and it is to Gervais and Merchant's credit that they wrote her the space to feel it.
The weakness is stamina. Gervais will press an awkward passage past the point where it tells us anything new about Brent, and we start waiting for the next person to speak. The later series have the opposite problem: Derek and After Life are gentler, and After Life in particular has been called sentimental. We have not reviewed them and will not judge them at length here. Gervais has said, "I try and make it so that if anyone's offended, I can explain why they shouldn't be." A joke that needs explaining afterwards is a Brent joke, and Gervais knows that better than anyone.
Start with The Office and then Extras, in that order, and watch someone else's face while he speaks.
Biography
Ricky Gervais is an English comedian, actor, writer and director. He co-created, co-wrote, co-directed and starred as David Brent in the BBC series The Office (2001). He also wrote and appeared in an episode of The Simpsons (1989).
Gervais has appeared in films including the Night at the Museum series (2006–2014) and hosted the Golden Globe Awards in 2010 and 2011. He was born on 25 June 1961 in Whitley, Berkshire, England.
