MONDO EXTRAS

WC: Or like a kid wants to be like his big brother.

BJN: Yeah, it's like a perfect big brother. It may be frustrating that we can't get all "A"s and be captain of the football team and do all that, but he's still a good influence on us, and we're better than we would have been without him.

WC: How often do you watch the British version, or do you not anymore?

BJN: My little brother is just getting into it. He loves our show, and he's a little troubled at how good the British show is. He just started it a week ago, and he was like, "Man, I'm glad I didn't see this before!"

WC: But I think if you watch both of them in tandem, you really start to see the differences. What do you think the main differences are?

BJN: Well, one difference recently that I think will work well for our show over time -- which is not something they had to concern themselves with -- is that we are seeing Michael be a good boss, too. We are seeing his strengths, and I think that actually may make his comedy resonate more in the long run, because he is more making fun of every boss, because he is a more typical boss who does these terrible things rather than a boss so dismally bad at his job that you can dismiss him out of hand. That's definitely different from theirs.

WC: I don't think we ever saw David Brent being even kind of competent.

BJN: He was also fired almost immediately after the show started, you know, which is obviously something that we didn't intend to do. I like to think that we have slightly better colours and better camera angles than last year, and I like to think that that's because documentaries, in general, are better made than they were five years ago, getting a little more well-made every year, and our documentary would be made not like Laguna Beach, but more like hit documentaries. So I think a very good justification for the show being brighter and more accessible is that documentaries aren't as drab as they were when the British Office came out in 2001. What have you noticed?