Fans of the TV show The Office know that the British version and the American version are both funny, but have differences that reflect their cultures. What you might not know is that there have been multiple versions of the show in many countries. How successful they are/were depended on how well the workplace comedy was altered to reflect each nation's existing workplace culture. For example, trying to faithfully replicate the original British show didn't work in Sweden, where offices are different, but they still have plenty of issues that could have been used for comedy.
At this very moment, people across Sweden are waging unrelenting passive-aggressive wars against one another for long-forgotten slights, but the characters in Kontoret are simply aggressive. In the pilot, the manager must choose which employee to make redundant, but Sweden has legislation regulating exactly how this is to be decided. And though the Swedish workplace is constructed by the fact that all we do in Sweden is have babies—with people going to endless parent-teacher meetings during work hours, taking days off to care for their sick children (which counts as paid leave, if your kids are under the age of twelve), and working around a family schedule more than an office schedule—none of the characters in Kontoret seem to have children. It’s very clear that the people involved in making the show have, indeed, had few regular jobs.
It’s disappointing, because Swedes are such gloriously awkward people. We require absurdly vast personal space, our men seem incapable of holding conversation for longer than three sentences, and while we pretend we are pro-equality, sexism and racism lurk just under the surface. Alcohol is so expensive that people treat buying a round like putting down a deposit on a house, and calculator apps emerge as soon as a bill is produced. We are incredibly socially conformist and we like to pretend that areas of Stockholm are like Brooklyn (there are, to be clear, no areas of Stockholm that are anything like any areas in Brooklyn). There is so much to make fun of! But what we get instead is a character pretending to have cerebral palsy.
Kontoret improved in the second season, but it wasn't enough to save the series. While many of these adaptations are no longer in production, they are available in reruns or on video. Read about adaptations of The Office in languages other than English and how they compare to the original at Popula. -via Digg