Stephen Merchant

Somebody in the office looks at the camera while David Brent is still talking. Nobody has to deliver a better line; the glance does the work. In The Office (2001), which Merchant created, wrote and directed with Ricky Gervais, the camera behaves like another colleague whose opinion counts, and the two of them resist making every reaction equally conspicuous. A look held a fraction too long would announce the joke. That restraint, holding rather than cutting, is the most useful thing Merchant has ever put on a screen.

He met Gervais at XFM in 1997, and the partnership produced two series we rate highly. The Office remains the finer: a comedy about the effort of being liked and what that effort costs everyone within earshot. Extras (2005) moved the same method to the fringes of the acting trade, where people have had far too long to consider why they have not got anywhere. We were more saddened than we expected by Maggie Jacobs's fear that she might be wasting her life, because Merchant and Gervais give Ashley Jensen the space to play it as an ordinary worry rather than a speech. Merchant was also an executive producer on the American The Office (2005), where his hand is harder to see.

The turn came with Cemetery Junction (2010), a 1970s coming-of-age film he directed and co-wrote with Gervais, and which the reviews found conventional and sentimental beside the television work. After that he went solo: Hello Ladies (2013), Fighting with My Family (2019), and The Outlaws (2021), a crime comedy set in his home city of Bristol that tries to hold suspense and jokes in the same hand. He has described this as "trying to have your cake and eat it". Remi Adefarasin has shot three of his projects, and the pictures have grown glossier as the mockumentary pretence has fallen away.

What works is the attention to people who fear being overlooked; what does not is the pacing when the discomfort is the whole point. Even in The Office, Gervais sometimes presses an awkward passage beyond what it tells us about Brent, and Merchant's shared writing and direction do not always check that impulse. In Extras, the sketch shape means that once we can see the humiliation coming, the wait is longer than the joke deserves. The solo work is kinder, and kindness removes that particular problem without, so far as we can tell, replacing it with anything as sharp.

Start with the 2001 The Office and watch the people who are not speaking. Then Extras, for Jensen. Merchant made his name as the man who did not cut away, and we are not yet certain what he does instead.