Welcome to The Office's Cecilia Marie Halpert

"What are the odds of this?" Yes, Michael, what so do you suppose the odds are of visiting the hospital room of a brand-new mother and finding her mother there? (Who ever heard of such a thing?) While we're on a numbers kick, how many ways does Michael find in just these two minutes to embarrass and inconvenience everyone except the person who ought to be ashamed? (My vote for Neatest Michael Trick: applying the hand sanitizer and wiping it off on his pants.)

by Ken

Newborns have not traditionally been boons to sitcoms. Oh, they get a certain amount of mileage out of the pregnancy, and sometimes even a certain amount of humor, and producers and networks always seem to think it's just the shot in the arm their aging series needs but there just isn't much humor to be mined in life with a newborn. Let's just hope the people behind The Office have a plan.

I've held back writing much about The Office because it's not so easy to explain why I like the U.S. version very much and its U.K. forebear not very much. The British Office attracted a strange sort of cult following, of a sort whereby if you pointed out to them that the show isn't funny, they would tell you that that's the joke! And isn't it brilliant?

I've even bought the DVDs of the British series, intending to look at them someday just to see if there was something there that I missed.

The American Office seems to me to have been adapted (by Greg Daniels) with remarkable skill. As Dunder MIfflin's Scranton boss, MIchael Scott (Steve Carell) has many of the same qualities of personal cluelessness, and I mean particularly about himself of Wernham Hogg's Slough boss David Brent (Ricky Gervais, co-creator of the series with Stephen Merchant) -- they both think they're exemplary bosses who understand and identify with their underlings. The American series pushes the cluelessness farther, to the point where Michael actually becomes funny, where Britain's David seemed to me primarily abject and pathetic.

Tim and Dawn in the original U.K. Office

There was nothing funny at all about the British series' most interesting character, poor Tim (Martin Freeman), who was so painfully aware of how all his life's hopes and ambitions had been dead-ended there at Wernham Hogg. The bleakness of his outlook was neatly seconded in his hopeless infatuation with the charming receptionist Dawn (Lucy Davis). Not surprisingly, the American version carefully crafted a counterpart couple in Jim (John Krasinski) and Pam (Jenna Fischer), complete with Pam's thug-fiancé Roy, a man who never once stopped to consider how this relationship was supposed to be supporting her.

Oh sure, our Jim is a softened version of their Tim, but in compensation he was given an utterly charming relaxed ease and sense of humor (a quality very much shared by Pam; it's one of the things that brings them together). And of course since Gervais and Merchant in the end relented and allowed Tim and Dawn to come together, I think we always knew that it would happen for Jim and Pam as well. Still, it's been a wonderful plot line in a show that has overflowed with wonderfully written and acted plot lines.

[AFTERTHOUGHT: It's been awhile since I've seen any of the British shows, and I haven't been much moved to look at the DVDs yet, but since I wrote this I recalled that it was wrong of me to say that there's nothing funny about Tim, who had quite a lively sense of humor too, I've been recalling. In this regard as well the American Jim is an excellent analog. But as the helplessness and desperation took over with Tim, they obscured -- at least in my memory -- his keen sense of irony.]

Now if they can just figure out how to handle the baby . . .

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