At 9:30 tonight NBC is premiering The Office, a remake of a BBC series of the same name. I'm skeptical that it's going to be any good. I'd go as far as to say it's probably going to suck. I'm going watch it mostly out of curiosity.

I like Steve Carell, of Daily Show fame, who's playing the boss. His deadpan humor is right on. If the show fails, it won't be because of him. It will be because of the nature of the show and the poor translation of humor from across the Atlantic.

I'm a huge fan of the original English series. Ricky Gervais, who co-wrote the show and stars as the clueless boss David Brent is, as my buddy John would say, sublime. He's like watching a car wreck. You don't know what he's going to do or say next, you just know it's going to be awful and you can't stop looking. It's the fine line between humor and revulsion that makes the Office work. It's for exactly this reason that I doubt the Americanized version will. The show is far too subtle for an American audience.

There's also no laugh track in the original series, and I'm told that NBC has left it out of the remake as well. How this will go over will be interesting. My feeling is that most people won't know when to laugh, partly because they've never had to know and partly because they just won't get it.

NBC has cautiously ordered only 6 episodes for the American The Office. Hopefully, I'll be wrong, the show will great, critics will love it and there will be enough groundswell of support from the fans of the original that NBC will have a keeper to replace the whole in their lineup left by Seinfeld, Frazier & Friends. One of the sad things about the original BBC series is that it only lasted 2 seasons and 12 shows. If the NBC series is a success, we might see office hijinks for years to come.