The Office: Around the World
By James Krouse on November 3, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Entertainment, Work/Life
The hit NBC TV series “The Office” has been on television so long and infiltrated so many depictions of office life in commercials, that it’s easy to forget that the show originated in Britain. While it was popular among PBS and BBC America viewers, it never had mainstream success. In fact, attempts to export the show to other countries failed as well. The key to success for the show was creating versions of the show for various countries which eventually included Germany, France, Russian, and Canada (Quebec).
Liesl Schillinger from Slate wrote a fantastic and interesting analysis of the American, British, French and German versions highlighting the differences in the show as a window in the differences in work life around the world. While generalities about different cultures are rarely helpful, the differences in the show do highlight how various cultures operate under familiar circumstances.
It’s an interesting and entertaining read and there are some intriguing video clips that, even though they are not sub-titled are really funny. If you watch the videos, you’ll recognize familiar trappings of office life far from Scranton, PA. From the article:
Watching all four versions back-to-back is not only a strangely unmooring experience—like seeing the film Groundhog Day over and over—it’s a crash course in national identity. And if any conjecture could be made about the cultural differences that these subtly contrasting programs reveal, it might be this one: These days, Germans and Americans are doing much of their living in and around their offices, while the Brits and French continue to live outside of them. Here, in broad strokes, are the chief differences. In the British version, nobody is working, nobody has a happy relationship, everyone looks terrible, and everybody is depressed. In the French version, nobody is working but even the idiots look good, and everybody seems possessed of an intriguing private life. In the German version, actual work is visibly being done, most of the staff is coupled up, and the workers never stop eating and drinking—treating the office like a kitchen with desks.
Read the full article here: Foreign Office on Slate
Tags: american, culture, english, foreign versions of the office, french, german, the office
2 Comments
James, I’ll have to catch the rest of the Slate article to see if goes further into this analysis of culture through “the office” but it seems to me that the most prevalent things we see even in our US version are generally cultural taboos. Nowhere does this seem more prevalent then the description of the German version. Perhaps Germans do constantly eat and dring and couple up at work, but jusging from what a VW dealer once told me I tend to think this is a sendup of a German Taboo. I said to the car salesman,”the cup holders don’t seem all that funtional.” His response was, “The Germans believe that when you are driving, you should be driving and that should be pleasurable enough without having a drink. The cupholders, such as they are, are there for Americans.”
Randy, It’s a good point. It’s definitely an American thing to treat the automobile as a mobile living room and office. And I know that many cultures in Europe scoff at eating at your desk. The TV show may be commenting on the Americanization of offices as much as anything else. Eating at our desks is sort of the other side of the coin from taking a blackberry on vacation. Ostensibly both are increasing productivity, but what do we lose when we don’t take a break from work to enjoy food? And what is the quality of work produced when you’re doing it while eating a ham sandwich? It’s all interesting fodder for discussion.