You will never win

Seeing green with The Office and S2E3: ‘Party’

This piece is part of a series on The Office (UK), running up to the 20th anniversary of its finale this Christmas. Don’t miss out by following me on Medium.

Next on the list for Merchant and Gervais is depicting birthdays at work, the group gifts and mid-afternoon booze at your desk and continual cake. (The birthday girl of the episode, Trudy, said last episode that the Slough branch of Wernham Hogg got away with murder: they sure throw a lot of parties.) The real theme, though, isn’t birthdays but what they make a certain kind of kid feel: jealousy — in the literal sense of possessiveness and in the vernacular sense of envy.

For the first time, however, these feelings come with a different inflection. The episode might seem typically ‘middle’: characters in it reiterate conflicts rather than undergo any dramatic changes; the episode comes in the middle of the series. But really it’s a hinge-point: a show-defining shift in our perspective on David Brent.

The most conventional jealousy of the episode, romantic, we see coming from Dawn towards Rachel and Tim, and see it has grounds. The two of them are running through the steps of flirtation: they ‘inadvertently’ keep touching each other, as accents to their chat, as gimme-tens and celebratory bum-bumps. They…