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 et's get one thing out of the way first: Ricky Gervais will always be David Brent, the annoyingly chummy buffoon of a boss from the BBC series The Office. And as good as his new show Extras is, processing Gervais as anyone else will prove difficult for fans of the prior series. (Example: As I was typing that last sentence, I mistakenly typed "Brent" when I meant "Gervais.") And like Orson Welles with Charles Foster Kane, the actor might find himself running into this problem over and over again.
Extras focuses on the travails of Andy (Gervais) and Maggie (Ashley Jensen), two slightly hapless professional extras who spend all their time on different movie sets doing "background work" — acting as anonymous members of massive crowds, faceless servants, or walking through a street so it doesn't look like the empty movie set it actually is. Andy, desperate to get even the smallest bit of dialogue, spends each episode jumping through increasingly embarrassing hoops to convince a star, a producer, or a screenwriter to give him a line. A speaking part would, of course, go some way towards legitimizing Andy's claim that he's a serious actor . . . and since this is a Ricky Gervais show, it's a safe bet to say that said line will be a long time coming. Maggie, on the other hand, spends much of her time trying to find a date, with equally catastrophic, cringe-inducing results.
Extras is a BBC-HBO co-production (it has already had its six-episode run in the UK), and its slightly schizophrenic shtick bears the marks of this two-headed venture. Gervais and collaborator Stephen Merchant (who, after a brief cameo in The Office, finally gets a real part here, as Andy's hilariously incompetent agent) continue to explore the comedy of humiliation they perfected with that earlier show, but the setting belies their newfound celebrity: Each episode takes place on a different film set, and one of the show's main gimmicks is watching big-name stars poke fun at themselves — Kate Winslet turns out to be a nasty phone sex expert, Ben Stiller exposes a childish obsession with his own box office, the actor Ross Kemp (a bigger name in the UK, having appeared in EastEnders and Ultimate Force) reveals himself to be a wimp desperately pretending to be a tough guy, and so on and so forth.
The results are certainly entertaining, but a pageant of celebrities goofing with their image is an entirely different animal than the more unassuming, slow-burn humor at which Gervais and Merchant excel. For example, a scene where Andy and Kate Winslet get chewed out by an ordinary set worker whose sexual peculiarities have just been outed rings rather false; Winslet's celebrity never comes into play, as if the scene were written for someone else. One gets the nagging notion that this is a case of celebs lining up to do the latest Ricky Gervais show, like one of those weaker Simpsons episodes whose only raison d'etre is to bag a big-name guest voice. (Let's hope Extras never subjects us to a completely gratuitous Red Hot Chili Peppers concert.)
Likewise, one misses the streamlined effectiveness of The Office, where almost every exchange seemed to build on the uncomfortable silences of the previous one. The humor in Extras is a lot more modular, like a series of jokes that could easily change order with little difference. The setting constantly changes, and a new set of relationships emerges with each episode — but the tenor of the jokes stays pretty much even. There's a free-flowing, sketch comedy looseness to this kind of structure, and maybe that contributes to the lighter tone. Don't look for the kind of subtle characterizations and the repressed romance subplots of the previous show. Extras is basically a series of gags.
Thankfully, those gags are still pretty damn funny, which is what it all comes down to. Despite some disappointment for those of us waiting for Gervais to develop his brand of humor further with this latest outing, Extras is still better than most other TV comedies out there. Gervais and newcomer Jensen definitely have a strange kind of chemistry going — each complements the other's awkwardness. Jensen gives Maggie a slightly dim, yet quietly winsome quality that is quite captivating; her mousy modesty matches Andy's ambitious shamelessness. And who's to say some more complicated relationships might not emerge as this show progresses? (There's a second series coming soon in England, so prepare for the long haul.) Expectations properly lowered, there are plenty of good reasons to look forward to Extras. Ricky Gervais lite is a lot better than no Ricky Gervais at all. n°
©2005 Bilge Ebiri and hooksexup.com.
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