No one is irrepaceable.
Ricky Gervais on the British Office was close – co-creating the show will give you that leverage. David Brent clearly wasn’t, as those who saw him begging for his job back from Neil Godwin will recall.
After Wernham Hogg had thrown its last Christmas party and Gervais won his Golden Globes (he doesn’t like to mention them), David Brent 2.0, in the shape of Steve Carell’s Michael Scott, was a more robust character.
Once the railroad of US sitcoms is on the tracks, it takes some shifting. Although The Office, The Young Ones and, most memorable, Fawlty Towers ran for only two series each, Cheers and Frasier each ran for 11 series and Seinfeld stayed on his couch for nine.
So when Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant swapped Slough for Scranton, Pennsylvania, there was a chance The Office would be cut mid-series like Steven Moffat’s Coupling – or that it would run and run.
It ran. The eighth series premieres next year, and after Steve Carell got tired of the Emmy snubs (six nominations, no wins yet) and left to appear on more film posters, producers had a Brent-shaped hole to keep the show on the road.
It was easier with an ensemble cast which included Rainn Wilson, John Krasinski, Amy Ryan, Mindy Kaling and Hangover star Ed Helms.
NBC didn’t so much throw the kitchen sink as a Corian quartz worktop. Oscar-winner Kathy Bates, Will Ferrell, Jim Carrey, Ray Romano, Catherine Tate and Gervais himself were all summoned to fill the Carell void.
What they’ve done for series eight is intriguing. Rather than a comic established from TV or film, they’ve chosen one of the most interesting film and television actors of the past two decades.
James Spader can do creepy (his career-announcing turn as Graham in Sex, Lies, and Videotape), playful (Boston Legal, opposite William Shatner), the everyman led astray (Bad Influence), seedy (the boss in Secretary), mysterious (the underrated Music of Chance) and even romantic lead (White Palace, opposite Susan Sarandon). And he was in Mannequin and Pretty In Pink, too.
Having seen Spader around 18 months ago as the lead in David Mamet’s Race, not one of the major Mamet plays, I can report that he’s no slouch in stage work, too.
Like Kevin Spacey, he edged his way from character parts into the lead roles, and he’s done it on one of America’s biggest shows. As he attempts to keep The Office in stationery business and Gervais and Merchant in royalties as the splendidly named Robert California, viewers in the States (and on Comedy Central in the UK) are about to find out if he can do funny, too.
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