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The difference between the UK and the US, summed up in a paragraph about 'The Office'

The difference between the UK and the US, summed up in a paragraph about 'The Office'

Despite a shared language and the cross-pollination of popular culture, the UK and the USA are not as similar as they can appear on the surface.

One quote from the New Yorker which manages to neatly capture the differences between our worldviews- through the medium of none other than Ricky Gervais - has clearly struck a chord.

The excerpt is from a story by Willa Paskin about the Channel 4 show 'Catastrophe' in an April issue.

Its wry observance of the British obsession with the class system has been posted to Twitter several times, amassing thousands of retweets:

UK sitcoms tend to be darker than American ones, encouraged by a powerful public broadcasting system whose aim is to serve the varying tastes of taxpayers, not the upbeat preferences of advertisers, and by a national psyche fixated on the immutability of the class system, not on a dream of self-improvement. Americans believe that things will get better. Brits laugh at how things stay the same. To become a hit in the United States, The Office not only had to transform the tragic, grating boss into a less tragic, less grating, more well-meaning boss; it had to cast off the message, central to the British original, that work is where you go to waste your life.

So everyone's enjoying the bank holiday, yes?

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