Eleanor Crane: I walked past my neighbor's flat last night — she had The Office on, the American one, which she watches on rotation — and I found myself thinking about Ricky Gervais. Because he and Stephen Merchant created the original, licensed it to NBC, served as executive producers on the American version, and then watched Greg Daniels essentially rebuild it from the inside out. I wonder if that felt like a betrayal or a relief.
Ben Okonkwo: Probably relief, given that it ran nine seasons. But the thing that interests me is what that says about the format as a commercial object — because a television format is a licensed package, a production bible, narrative architecture, characters, visual style. That's the product. And Greg Daniels' first move was to alter the humor rhythm, the cringe tolerance, the cultural references.
Eleanor Crane: So you buy the architecture and the first creative decision is structural renovation.
Ben Okonkwo: Which has since been repeated in Canada, France, Germany, Brazil, Chile, Russia, Israel — every market that licensed The Office faced that same call. How much of Gervais and Merchant's original do you actually keep?
Eleanor Crane: And this is a billion-euro industry making that decision on — what, instinct? Case studies from one franchise?
Ben Okonkwo: Hm — mostly the latter, honestly. There's no systematic comparative data on whether heavily localized remakes outperform faithful ones. The industry runs on The Office as its proof of concept, even though The Office is, by the measures that matter, the most radical departure from its source material on record.
Eleanor Crane: That's — I mean, that's a strange place for a multi-billion-euro industry to be standing. What are you actually buying when you buy the license?
Ben Okonkwo: That's the thing I want to work through — because the format fidelity versus cultural localization trade-off gets described as structurally durable across all markets and eras, but the evidence we have for that claim is… much thinner than the confidence with which it's stated.
Eleanor Crane: But the thinness of that evidence — that's actually what I want to pull on, because it implies the failure mode is obvious enough that nobody felt they needed to prove it. Like the mechanism is self-evident. Is it?
Ben Okonkwo: It kind of is, once you see it. The core idea is just: humor isn't portable. Not because people don't laugh in other countries — obviously they do — but because the thing that makes a joke land is almost always load-bearing on something specific to the room it was built in. Language, institution, shared reference. Remove any one of those and the joke doesn't travel. It collapses.
Eleanor Crane: Like — a joke is infrastructure, not content.
Ben Okonkwo: That's exactly the frame. Imagine a script editor in São Paulo — she's opened a production bible, she's on page twelve, and there's a joke. The joke is a pun that only resolves in English. The setup is a Thanksgiving dinner reference. She now has two problems that are actually one problem: puns are language-specific constructions, you can't render them literally, you have to replace them entirely. And Thanksgiving doesn't exist in Brazil as a cultural touchstone, so the emotional shorthand it's supposed to carry — nostalgia, awkward family, obligation — that whole register just isn't there. Neither element survives translation. Not poorly — not at all.
Eleanor Crane: Is this actually the same problem everywhere, or does it look different depending on the target culture?
Ben Okonkwo: Different texture, same failure modes — and we have named academic case studies for this. The Indian remake Mind Your Language and the Russian remake of How I Met Your Mother, Kak ya vstretil vashu mamu, both get cited specifically because they hit all three: wordplay that can't cross the language boundary, social references that mean nothing to the new audience, and — this one is under-discussed — comedic timing. The rhythm of a pause, where the laugh is supposed to land, that follows culturally specific conventions. You can reproduce a script word for word and still have it feel wrong because the performance rhythm doesn't transfer mechanically.
Eleanor Crane: Wait — timing is the third one? Not just a production note but an actual structural failure point?
Ben Okonkwo: Right — because timing is culturally calibrated. A beat that reads as deadpan in the British original reads as confused silence somewhere else. Or it reads as the joke not arriving. The script is faithful, the actors are performing faithfully, and the audience is waiting for something that already passed.
Eleanor Crane: So the production bible delivers the architecture and the failure simultaneously. That's — I mean, that's what makes this structural rather than a craft problem.
Ben Okonkwo: And that's actually where the production bible becomes — I mean, it's not just a guide, it's the commercial object itself. The production bible is the operational core of what you're licensing. Characters, settings, narrative rules, episode architecture. That document is the product. So when the script editor in São Paulo opens it and has to gut the jokes to make them work, she's dismantling the thing she just paid for.
Eleanor Crane: That's a circular argument built into the transaction.
Ben Okonkwo: Exactly — and transcreation is the industry's proposed exit from that loop. You preserve comedic intent, you shift the cultural framing. You don't translate the Thanksgiving joke, you find the local equivalent of awkward obligation and you rebuild from there. The intent survives. The joke survives. The production bible does not.
Eleanor Crane: Which raises — and I think this is the uncomfortable part — what is the license actually worth, then? If successful transcreation requires dismantling the bible, the better you execute, the less you have what you licensed.
Ben Okonkwo: And there's a hard case for that. MTV's 2011 Skins — British Channel 4 original, adapted for the US. They tried to stay close. Recreated specific scenes almost shot for shot. And it collapsed, partly because faithfulness meant reproducing content that ran into questions over child pornography laws in the US context. So the faithful approach failed legally, not just creatively.
Eleanor Crane: Wait — legally?
Ben Okonkwo: The very fidelity was the liability. Which is the opposite end of the spectrum from Greg Daniels' table-writing process at NBC — where the whole point was radical departure. And that's treated as the template now. But I want to flag the assumption underneath that, because — well, we'll get into whether The Office US is actually a replicable model or just a very contingent outcome the industry has over-indexed on.
Eleanor Crane: So what you're describing is sociolinguistic balancing — that's the academic framing — and it's one of two major challenge categories. And the industry's solution to it systematically erodes the format identity that cost billions of euros to build into a global trade.
Ben Okonkwo: That's the structure of it, yeah. You buy format integrity. You achieve commercial success by abandoning it. The logic only closes if the brand association — the name, the franchise — transfers even after the content doesn't.
Eleanor Crane: But that brand association argument only holds if the original's name actually travels — and I wonder if we're really talking about Greg Daniels's specific writing room making that happen. Not the format. Not even NBC. That particular room.
Ben Okonkwo: That's the problem with table writing — that collaborative American model where a room of writers builds the script together. That's what produced The Office US. And it's not a portable tool. Countries that use individual-writer models can't replicate that process even if they buy an identical license.
Eleanor Crane: So the method is culturally specific too, not just the jokes.
Ben Okonkwo: Right — and Gervais and Merchant sanctioning Daniels's departures as executive producers, that was a unique creative condition. Two British creators actively greenlighting the dismantling of their own format. I mean, does that happen again? Is there a second franchise where the original creators hand a foreign developer that kind of latitude and it works?
Eleanor Crane: And we have no data on that. The industry has — what, one confirmed working template and a graveyard it doesn't audit.
Ben Okonkwo: No systematic win-rate data. None. The format trade grew from scattered television exchanges in the 1950s into a multi-billion-euro annual industry and the evidentiary base for its central creative strategy is essentially one outcome. That's — actually, no, it's not even one outcome, it's one outcome with a specific set of conditions attached that almost certainly don't replicate.
Eleanor Crane: Does growing global media literacy change any of that math? If audiences already know Thanksgiving, do you need less translation?
Ben Okonkwo: It softens one layer — a German viewer recognizing Thanksgiving as a reference is real. But that's audience familiarity, not comedy infrastructure. A German writer still has to translate American office-politics rhythm into something that lands locally. Those are completely different problems and literacy only solves the first one.
Eleanor Crane: Which is maybe the most honest thing the field could say — that the trade-off is structural, it's durable, it recurs every time format architecture meets culturally embedded humor. And the industry's answer to that is transcreation, which is — I mean, it's less a solution than a very sophisticated name for the same unresolved tension.
Ben Okonkwo: Billions of euros moving through a system that still can't measure its own success rates. That's the strange part. Not that the trade-off exists — it obviously does — but that we're here.
Eleanor Crane: My neighbor's still watching Greg Daniels's version on rotation. Not Gervais and Merchant's. The lucky exception became the only rule anyone remembers.
