>(the office) I’ve been unable to figure out what makes it so devastatingly effective, and elevates it so far above the likes of Dilbert and Office Space.
Dilbert is a hand drawn comic so it will never have the media reach of TV. It also tends to focus more on the details of the bureaucratic brokenness for people to laugh rather than cry at in daily life.
The office is syndicated TV with a new episode every week. It simply has high rewatch value. The broken office bureaucracy is used as a plot device rather than the focus of the show. The show focuses on characters and how they react to work life which keeps the show more funny than sad.
I would argue that Office Space actually was more effective than both of these other two. It was a one off movie from over 20 years ago that people across age groups still regularly reference. You can only watch a movie so many times. There is not much opportunity for syndication or binge watching. After you watch it 20 times 20 years ago it kind of drops out of the yearly zeitgeist.
Adams did try an animated Dilbert series but it didn't do very well or last very long (and wasn't especially good). There was a time when I really liked Dilbert--probably in part because I worked at a cubicle farm tech company that probably resembled PacBell where Adams worked in quite a few ways.
But Adams left (and I left) and, for the most part, Dilbert ended up mostly stuck in a 90s cubicle time warp notwithstanding some zingers about cloud from time to time. (Some of which hit amusingly close to home as the consultant I was later.)
It had pretty wacky humour, and a lot of the office dynamics it talks about are still relatable today. I've seen several Gruntmaster 3000-esque projects since.
> But Adams left (and I left) and, for the most part, Dilbert ended up mostly stuck in a 90s cubicle time warp
This was made obvious during COVID lockdowns to me. He had a lot of trouble addressing it in a way that felt as original and genuine as I was used to from the strip.
Silicon Valley I'm probably close enough to fake even though it's not my day to day thing directly. But college life satire/humor say. No matter how much second and third-hand research I did it would probably be off in a lot of ways.
When you're actually living something, there are a ton of happenings which you can file the serial numbers off, exaggerate a little (or not), and things pretty much write themselves.
I was making an app to classify food if it had nuts or not. Someone on HN commented about hot dog or not app that was in the episode. I didn't have HBO so I wasn't even aware of its existence.
I always feel like I'm the only one who enjoyed the series. I don't know what's so terribly bad about it. It's not The Simpsons, and it's not _that_ related to the strip, but it's amusing in many ways.
Wow that is bad. Its like they gave an intern a shoestring budget and told them to make something happen. The voice actors are like they just grabbed the nearest person and told them hey you are gonna voice these characters.
The show isn't great, but these are hardly unknown cast members/voice actors. Daniel Stern, Chris Elliot, Larry Miller, Jason Alexander, Tom Kenny, Tress MacNielle, Maurice LaMarche, Kathy Griffin. This is nearly an all-star cast for the late 90s.
Let's decouple the art from the artist. My theory is that Adams knows exactly what he is doing and is making a living by feeding the troll / fanning the flames. I stopped watching his blog / consuming the strip a long time ago (cca 2017) but I thoroughly enjoyed it for years before I stopped.
What works as a 3-panel comic strip falls flat on its face when translated too literally to video. You need to hire good writers, director, animators, voice actors, etc. to make an effective video show, and you need to have an idea better than “show a sequence of loosely related 3-panel comic strip jokes, but animated”.
There is a joke at some point in time where they say pathway electronics is going to merge with etech management. And they're gonna call the new company path-e-tech management. How would a kid get this joke?
"The Office" we're talking about here is not a syndicated TV show with a new episode every week; it's a British mini-series. You're likely referring to the US version of "The Office", which ran for 9 seasons and was wildly different from the British show (the showrunners attempted to clone the original but discovered that David Brent's character suited Ricky Gervais far more than it did Steve Carrell, and course-corrected to a different kind of show.)
> I’ll be basing this entire article on the American version of the show, which is more fully developed than the original British version, though the original is perhaps more satisfyingly bleak.
Dilbert is a hand drawn comic so it will never have the media reach of TV. It also tends to focus more on the details of the bureaucratic brokenness for people to laugh rather than cry at in daily life.
The office is syndicated TV with a new episode every week. It simply has high rewatch value. The broken office bureaucracy is used as a plot device rather than the focus of the show. The show focuses on characters and how they react to work life which keeps the show more funny than sad.
I would argue that Office Space actually was more effective than both of these other two. It was a one off movie from over 20 years ago that people across age groups still regularly reference. You can only watch a movie so many times. There is not much opportunity for syndication or binge watching. After you watch it 20 times 20 years ago it kind of drops out of the yearly zeitgeist.