Does Amazon Keep Remaking ‘The Office’ to Normalize Its Corporate Policies?

It’s no secret that The Office has been remade time and time again in various countries all over the world. In addition to the original U.K. version, and the beloved American take, there have been officially-sanctioned Office remakes in Poland, India and Brazil, just to name a few. 

If there’s any takeaway from the global appeal of this premise, it’s that shitty bosses and awkward romances are as pervasive in offices as beige walls and soul-crushing fluorescent lights. 

Now there are two new international versions of The Office — a recently announced Mexican adaptation, and the Australian remake that came out earlier this month, both of which are being released on Amazon Prime Video.

The timing of this news is a little odd, considering that the Australian Office is all about “the return to work after COVID” and it dropped just a month after Amazon mandated that employees return to in-person work five days a week. This marks a “significant shift” from their earlier post-pandemic policy, which “required corporate workers to be in the office at least three days a week.”

The move has been controversial, and wildly unpopular with employees, 91 percent of whom are “unhappy” with the decision according to one survey. It’s also reportedly “backfired,” prompting a mass exodus of qualified employees in search of hybrid positions. 

There’s really no good reason to force people back into offices, considering that hybrid jobs benefit employees’ mental health, and benefit employers by increasing worker productivity. The in-person push seems to be more about maintaining authoritarian control and justifying real-estate portfolios than anything else. So is it possible that Amazon is using remakes of The Office to try and normalize in-person work culture and justify their unpopular corporate policy? 

This may sound a little far-fetched, but it’s not like big streamers are above using their in-house content to spread subtle, entirely self-serving messages. For example, Ted Lasso and a number of other Apple TV+ shows bent over backwards to illustrate the benefits of various Apple products.

While we have no conclusive evidence of Amazon performing similar feats of subliminal sneakiness, their press release for the Australian show did begin by proclaiming: “It’s time to get back to The Office!”

To be fair, in the show, the return-to-office push comes from Hannah, the David Brent/Michael Scott-esque manager, purely for selfish reasons. But her desire to force everybody back to an in-person routine is ultimately vindicated when the show’s Jim and Pam surrogates happily accept those terms because it will allow for inter-office flirtations. 

It’s also been said that Office remakes must follow the plot line of the original’s pilot, per Ricky Gervais’ instructions. But while the first pilot involved downsizing staff, this one begins with the paper company threatening to nix the physical office, implicitly drawing a comparison between the importance of people and the importance of company real estate. 

It would have been more realistic if the show ended halfway through episode two because everyone quit that particular paper company.

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