A little while ago I made a video about the American version of The Office.
So now let’s talk about the good one.
I’m sorry.
I don’t want to be that guy.
But I am.
I am that guy.
I love the American Office, it’s one of my favorite shows, but the original BBC version
is superior in every way and that’s just how I feel, and I don’t care if it makes
me a snob or whatever, okay?
Godda–
While the two shows have many similarities, there are also crucial differences between
the original Office and the American version.
For instance, the British version is more careful about maintaining verisimilitude and
presenting itself in a style that is reasonably consistent with a real documentary series,
whereas the American version retains the stylistic conceits of a documentary – especially the
device of cutting to talking-head interviews with the characters – but otherwise eventually
abandons the pretense that we’re watching a real documentary series about real people
– until the final season, that is, when the mostly forgotten documentary angle is
all of a sudden super important again.
The British version is also a lot bleaker, generally speaking.
It does eventually end on a hopeful note, but it doesn’t strike that note until the
last few minutes of the Christmas special that concludes the series.
The American version, on the other hand, provides overtly sentimental happy endings for nearly
all of its major characters.
The protagonist of the British version, office manager David Brent, is fired and shown tearfully
asking to keep his job at the end of the second series.
His American equivalent, Michael Scott, is allowed to leave on his own terms to start
a new life with his soulmate.
And there are more differences between the two shows I could point out.
But for this video, I wanted to focus on one that I first recognized years ago and which
has fascinated me ever since.
It’s similar to the contrast of the pessimism of the British version to the eventual optimism
of the American one, but it’s not quite the same thing.
I’m talking about the willingness of the British version of The Office to present us
with thoroughly unlikable characters – characters who, to my mind, at least, are shown to have
no redeeming qualities whatsoever – including someone who might just be the most unlikable
character ever created for a sitcom.
That would be this guy, Chris Finch, played fearlessly by Ralph Ineson.
Finch is a traveling salesman for Wernham-Hogg, the paper company depicted in the series.
He’s also David Brent’s best friend.
Brent considers the two of them to be a brilliant comedic duo, and is either oblivious or indifferent
to Finch’s constant cruel bullying of everyone around him, Brent included.
Finch isn’t the only unlikable character on The Office by a long shot.
Brent is extremely unappealing for much of the series – crude, arrogant, thin-skinned,
attention-starved.
Gareth, Brent’s right-hand-man, is shown to be petty and creepy and predatory.
Lee, Dawn’s fiance who works in the warehouse, comes across as a joyless misogynist most
of the time.
But those characters are also allowed fleeting moments of grace, or are developed in ways
that allow us to sympathize with them, at least for a time.
Lee is a bastard and it’s obvious from the beginning that he’s wrong for Dawn and that
their relationship is a trap from which she must escape if she’s ever going to be happy,
but there are brief flashes of humanity from Lee here and there, moments that suggest he
genuinely cares about Dawn, or is capable of remorse.
Gareth is an irritating ass and also, as previously mentioned, a fucking creep, but he’s also
constantly mocked and picked on by Tim and Dawn.
Sure, he has it coming most of the time, but even so.
He also seems genuinely upset when he thinks Brent is leaving to accept a promotion at
the end of the first series.
Brent is insufferable, but his yearning to be loved, to be thought of by his employees
as not just a great boss but a friend and a mentor, makes it hard to totally hate the
guy.
And yeah, when he does eventually get fired he is devastated and begs his bosses to reconsider.
He’s a human being – an immature, narcissistic, sometimes nasty human being, but a human being
nonetheless.
And by the end of the series, we’re given reason to hope that he’s capable of growth
and change.
None of those things is true for Chris Finch.
Finch is a miserable piece of shit through and through.
He isn’t sympathetic.
He isn’t humanized to any significant degree.
He isn’t even funny, which never ceases to impress me.
He’s like the embodiment of the Platonic ideal of unlikability.
If the prisoners in the Allegory of the Cave saw the shadow of an unlikable character on
the wall, that shadow would be cast by Chris Finch.
Finch is so unlikable that his equivalent on the American series, Todd Packer, is the
most unlikable character on that show.
But even Packer, as contemptable as he is, has to bow before the irresistable and unrelenting
shittiness of Chris Finch.
We hear Finch mentioned a few times before we actually meet him.
In the show’s first episode we hear his voice as he leaves a sexist message on Brent’s
answering machine.
In the second episode Finch is implicated in a prank where a photograph with Brent’s
face photoshopped onto the body of a naked woman is shared throughout the office.
In the third episode Finch finally appears onscreen.
In his first scene he mocks Brent viciously, while Brent stands by and giggles the entire
time.
No one else seems to think any of this is the least bit funny, but Brent and Finch believe
themselves to be hilarious.
Finch shows up a few more times throughout the series.
But that first appearance – episode 3, series 1 – is quite possibly Finch at his worst.
The focus of that episode is an annual trivia contest where the employees compete against
each other.
We’re told that the team of Brent and Finch have won the trivia contest the last six years
in a row.
But this year the office has a temp worker, Ricky, who once appeared on the TV quiz show
Blockbusters.
Finch feels threatened by Ricky and tries to bully him, but Ricky no-sells it and goes
on to team up with Tim to win the trivia contest, breaking Brent and Finch’s winning streak.
Finch is such a sore loser that he steals Tim’s shoes, takes them outside and throws
them over the top of the building in order to win a bet with Ricky and prove, in his
mind at least, that he is the better man.
If you haven’t seen the show – firstly, thanks for watching this far into the video!
– and secondly, I cannot overemphasize how repellent and unfunny Chris Finch is.
He is utterly loathsome through and through and there is almost no relief from it.
He doesn’t make us laugh, he doesn’t really ever get a comeuppance, he has no arc, he
doesn’t grow or change or experience a moment of self-awareness.
I can’t think of another character like him, at least not in a comedy show.
Including a character as unpleasant as Finch, and presenting him so unflinchingly, is a
gutsy choice by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the creators of The Office.
It’s also a smart one.
Finch is so horrible that we can learn a lot about the other characters in the show just
by how they react to him.
When the show introduces company executive Neil as Brent’s new boss in series two,
he seems like a good guy at first.
And that’s mostly what Neil is – a good guy who serves as a foil for Brent by being
a competent, popular boss who doesn’t put up with any of Brent’s usual nonsense.
But Neil is also a friend of Chris Finch – he even teases Finch about stealing his jokes,
to which Finch replies by insisting that he only borrows them.
Judging by their brief interaction, Neil gets along with Finch even better than Brent does.
And Finch doesn’t pick on Neil the way he constantly does with Brent.
Now, the main point of this is to serve Brent’s character, to underline what a threat Neil
is to Brent – not only is he better at his job than Brent is, he also has a better rapport
with Brent’s best friend than Brent does!
But it also tells us something about Neil.
The fact that Neil gets along so well with someone as unapologetically awful as Finch
is a bit of a red flag.
We might not notice it at first – in fact, I didn’t notice it until I’d watched the
series a few times – but it’s definitely there: why is Neil such pals with Finch?
Maybe he’s not such a good guy after all.
Neil’s friendly interaction with Finch is a setup that doesn’t pay off until near
the end of the Christmas special.
And it doesn’t pay off for Neil or for Finch – it pays off for Brent.
David Brent fancies himself as something of a comic genius.
But the fact that he finds Finch to be so funny reinforces what a terrible sense of
humor Brent actually has.
Brent’s tolerance of Finch’s cruel behavior also shows us his self-serving hypocrisy – he
has no problem with bullying, as long as he’s on the right side of it or can convince himself
it’s all harmless banter.
But remember I said by the end of the series we have some hope that Brent is capable of
changing?
Where does that hope come from?
It comes from one line Brent delivers to Finch in the final minutes of the Christmas special.
After spending much of the two-part special searching for a date to take to the office
Christmas party, Brent hits it off with Carol.
She’s sweet and funny and seems to really like Brent.
And he seems to really like her.
After Carol exits the party, Brent walks up to Finch and Neil and makes some small talk.
Then Neil says to Brent, “You didn’t bring your dog tonight?”
– oh yeah, Brent has a dog and earlier in the episode he got in trouble with Neil for
bringing the dog into the office, so that’s what that’s all about.
And Finch says, “Did you not see her?
She just left!”
And instead of giggling or taking Finch’s mean-spirited joke in stride, Brent turns
on him and says “Chris.
Why don’t you fuck off?”
It’s a thrilling, cathartic moment.
It’s made all the more satisfying by how sympathetic Brent has become by this point.
The Christmas special does a great deal of work getting us to not only laugh at Brent,
but to like him.
The special finds him not only looking for love, but down on his luck.
He’s lost his job as the manager of the office.
He’s reduced to making a living as a traveling salesman and trying to cash in on his minor
and rapidly waning celebrity.
He goes on a series of blind dates where he behaves terribly.
He lashes out at a woman he blames for ruining one of his celebrity appearances (it wasn’t
her fault, of course – it was his).
And as I mentioned already, he’s banned from visiting his former employees at the
office after bringing his dog with him.
He’s still an oblivious jerk for most of the episode – and it’s funny, because
Brent as a clueless doofus with a chronic case of foot-in-mouth disease is hilarious
– but we also start to sympathize with him, to root for him.
And we’re not simply rooting for him to succeed; we’re rooting for him to be a better
person.
When he tells Chris Finch to fuck off, he’s showing us that he has that potential.
He can grow.
He can be better.
That moment works so well not just because we’re on Brent’s side, but because Finch
is so thoroughly vile.
He is, as Ricky Gervais observes in the directors’ commentary for that episode, the sort of person
Brent never should have been friends with in the first place.
So when Brent finally stands up to him, it plays as a major turning point.
It might sound strange, but Chris Finch is one of my favorite characters on the show.
I don’t like him, but I admire him as a work.
I admire the craft that went in to creating him.
I admire the courage it took to create him – not just because he’s an unfunny character
in a very funny show, but because of all the characters in The Office, Finch is the most
uncomfortably real.
The world is sadly filled with Chris Finches.
Over the last decade or so, quite a few of them have started YouTube channels.
Some of them have even run for office – and gotten elected, god help us all.
They’re the sort of viscerally off-putting people who think their willingness to laugh
at someone they’ve just shoved into the mud makes them a comedian.
Small-minded, mean, vindictive, ignorant, overflowing with unwarranted self-regard – I
daresay many of us know a Chris Finch or two or three in real life.
And we can vouch for the fact that the artists who created him got him just right.
Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, and Ralph Ineson brought to life in Chris Finch a singular
character, and they placed this deeply unpleasant and unfunny man in one of the funniest comedies
ever made.
He’s a representation of some of the worst qualities of humanity.
He’s a reminder to writers that just because you’re writing something funny, that doesn’t
mean every single character in it has to be funny.
He’s one of a kind – on TV, anyway.
Jesus, wouldn’t it be nice if there were only one of him in the real world, too?
Let me take a second to just imagine what that would be like.
Oh, yeah.