{"id":200,"date":"2005-04-04T17:45:52","date_gmt":"2005-04-05T01:45:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/songoose.com\/?p=7"},"modified":"2025-07-22T18:38:00","modified_gmt":"2025-07-22T18:38:00","slug":"the-office-an-american-workplace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/?p=200","title":{"rendered":"The Office: An American Workplace"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I caught the first two eps on Bravo over the weekend and was pleasantly surprised. As a huge fan of the BBC original, I had extremely low expectations, especially after the flat out disaster that was the US version of Coupling.<\/p>\n<p>The biggest difference for me is that &#8220;Michael&#8221; is not nearly as horrible as David Brent &#8212; he&#8217;s funny and obviously a bad person, but he doesn&#8217;t make you quite as uncomfortable as Brent did on a regular basis. Perhaps this will improve in the future, but Brent had it down from the beginning. I do have to say, though, that most of the actors do a pretty good job with the subtle comedy. I haven&#8217;t really bought into the Gareth\/Dwight character yet, but otherwise I like pretty much everyone. <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Diversity Day&#8221; was a nice touch &#8212; clearly took a page from the training day episode (my all time favorite), but didn&#8217;t follow it too closely. Gone was Brent on guitar, easily the funniest moments of the original show. Good for them though &#8212; if they had tried to duplicate the original, it never would have worked. They &#8220;Americanized&#8221; the concept well, bringing in a beautifully bad Chris Rock impression from Michael and some other quality inappropriate comments that US audiences should appreciate. <\/p>\n<p>I doubt it will ever be as good as the BBC version, but I&#8217;m definitely going to keep watching.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I caught the first two eps on Bravo over the weekend and was pleasantly surprised. As a huge fan of the BBC original, I had extremely low expectations, especially after the flat out disaster that was the US version of Coupling. The biggest difference for me is that &#8220;Michael&#8221; is not nearly as horrible as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=200"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":641,"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions\/641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}