After graduation, Daniels was accepted to New York University’s law school, but deferred for a year while trying to make it in comedy. He and a writing partner started off at HBO’s parody series “Not Necessarily the News,” and Daniels soon graduated to “Saturday Night Live,” a common source of employment for Lampoon alums.

The sketch show is also where producer Schur got his start, just a few months after leaving the College. Schur, an English concentrator in Adams House and a graduate of my high school, writes in an e-mail that the Lampoon didn’t prepare him “for anything, really. Perhaps if I had a career as a guy who lounged around drunk in poorly-maintained Flemish castles.” He wrote his thesis on David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” and Pynchon’s “V”: “My thesis was: these two books are awesome and here’s why. (Basically.)”

While the Lampoon-heavy writing staff of “The Simpsons” make generous use of Harvardian allusions (the curator of the Springfield Historical Society is named Hollis Hurlbut), Schur says he doesn’t rely on college for comedy. “I don’t think undergraduate experiences have really tangibly ‘shown up in my writing’ per se,” he writes, “except perhaps in some kind of Proustian/Spinozan collective conscious experience way. Please do not write that I used ‘Proustian/Spinozan collective conscious experience’ in my interview. I don’t really even know what it means, or if it is accurate, and I don’t want Harvard comp lit junior faculty making fun of me.”

As far as television comedy goes, Schur takes a bit of a bleak view: “Comedy is hurting right now on TV, I think. There are twelve ‘Law and Orders’ and fifteen ‘CSI’’s, but no new comedies have really set the world on fire. Hopefully, these things are cyclical, but when you only have 20 minutes to tell a story, it’s hard for new comedies to hook audiences.”

A DIFFERENT TYPE OF SHOW

Schur’s concerns over comedy’s recent travails may partially explain his attraction to “The Office”: the show is part of a new breed of television comedy, an innovative format informed by the same reality genre that is ostensibly usurping its place. It shies away from the usual tropes afflicting sitcoms: ethnic mismatches, didactic moralizing, happy endings. The format falls in the same category as Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and Fox’s “Arrested Development,” shows shot in a single-camera, verité style that move away from the theatrical quality of traditional sitcoms.

Daniels was turned onto the show after his agent forwarded tapes of the British series. “I ended up staying up all night watching it after I put it in because it was so compelling and fantastic,” he says. He quickly gained the blessing of original “Office” creators Gervais and Stephen Merchant, and the project was up and running.

Daniels and his creative staff—which also includes writer and actor B.J. Novak ’01, last seen pranking celebrities on MTV’s “Punk’d” and bringing Bob Saget to campus with his undergraduate variety show—put a premium on keeping the qualities that made the British version click.

The network “gave us tremendous leeway,” Schur writes. “Kevin Reilly, the President of NBC, was a big fan of the original, and the last thing he wanted to do was take this brilliantly conceived show and ‘Americanize’ it—laugh track, cheesily good-looking actors, and so on.”

“It wouldn’t have come out well if there had been a big divergence between what the network wanted and what we wanted,” Daniels said. “The fact that people at the network like Kevin Reilly and Carolyn and [NBC President] Jeff Zucker [’86, and a former Crimson president] were interested in doing a faithful version of this is the reason it’s on the air.”

Of course, there are some differences. The BBC benefits from being commercial-free—so Daniels and company were forced to cut the length of the show down about 10 minutes per half-hour. Some jokes are telegraphed to the audience before they occur—marked off by a cough or a smile, little clues that were anathema in the British original.

Perhaps the most obvious disparity is the American actors’ lack of nuance. Carell fails to bring the childlike vulnerability to his boss that made Brent almost human; Carell’s creation is more caricature, and the utter lack of sympathy he evokes in the audience seems to leave out a crucial element of the original series. And the Dwight character lacks the sweetness that made Gareth less than unbearable.

These critiques are admittedly minor, and Daniels tells me these nuances will develop as the series continues. “There’s a bit of a difference in the sense that the British show is like a miniseries,” Daniels says. He hopes the American “Office” has a longer run of several seasons, so the character development, rapid in the BBC version, will “be a little slower for us.”

“We certainly want to infuse our show with all of those character traits and mood-defining emotions,” Schur writes. “At the same time, the British show ran for 12 episodes, total, over two years, so they could afford to really jump right in and develop that heart-wrenching pathos immediately.”

PUDDING AT THE PEACOCK