Adult Swim To Air The Office UK Starting Summer 2009

Adult Swim today announced it has acquired the legendary hit BBC comedy, The Office, from BBC Worldwide.  Both seasons of the two-time Golden Globe Award-winning series will begin airing on Adult Swim this summer.  Adult Swim will also air The Office Christmas special.

Created, written and directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, The Office is about the day-to-day lives of office employees in the Slough, Bershire branch of the fictitious Wernham Hogg Paper Company.  The main character in the series, David Brent, as played by Gervais, is now firmly established as one of the great creations of comedy—and one familiar to office workers everywhere.  As regional manager of the company, Brent fancies himself as a great team leader using humor to win the loyalty of his staff.  In reality, he is belittling, smug, sexist, insensitive, patronizing and unthinkingly offensive.  He tells crude jokes and talks in clichés and only gets away with it because his staff feels obliged to humor him.  His employees are stuck in mundane, dead-end jobs, surrounded by irritating colleagues and engaged in bitter feuds over the most trivial things.  Filmed as a fly-on-the-wall documentary, The Office is working life at its worst. 

Since its UK debut in 2001, the series has captured the imagination of audiences around the world, with 81 broadcasters in 45 territories acquiring the UK original, and local versions being produced in the U.S., Canada, France, Chile, Russia and Israel.

Today’s announcement to add The Office comes on the heels of the addition of the BBC hit The Mighty Boosh, a deal also done with BBC Worldwide, which had its Adult Swim debut March 29.