WATCH THIS: Ricky Gervais' original 'Office'

Ricky Gervais is now a comedy cottage industry, but he was nobody back in 2001 when he co-created and starred in the original British version of The Office. Find out why he's been hot stuff ever since, as the show gets another go, in late night's adult swim block. Its delight and discomfort start on Cartoon Network this Friday night at midnight ET (repeated at 4 a.m. ET) -- a tucked-away time that's easy to overlook. (As we did, until astute reader Gregg B brought it to our attention.)

But what a way to head into the weekend, watching Gervais' "seedy boss" become a TV classic, cementing the dead-stop painful silence as one of modern sitcomedy's crucial contributions. Poor David Brent -- he wants to be loved, he wants to be clever, he wants to climb the corporate ladder, he wants to dance and sing up a storm. Too bad he's utterly inept. At everything.

Yet Brent isn't just silly, he's poignant. The BBC's original Office conveys a depth of compassion that NBC's American version can't equal. That's because Gervais is a terrific actor -- not merely a comedian, but a master of wounded humanity. The bleakness of his firm's paper-pushing drudgery truly hits home when his vulnerability and desperation intersect with his stunned staff's horror at feeling forced to endure their forlorn chief's efforts to "amuse" them.

Gervais put that talent to more impact in HBO's Extras, his 2005 series about a one-line actor who manages to make even movie stars ill at ease while pursuing his "career," abetted by an amiable but useless agent played by co-creator Stephen Merchant (and an equally adrift fellow actor played by Ugly Betty sidekick Ashley Jensen). When Gervais' dubiously talented actor actually makes it big, he and Merchant have an even more ruthless rip at the structural cliches of the trite sitcoms on which they were raised.

But The Office remains the pair's masterpiece of inspiration and insight -- all the more effective because they only made 12 episodes. That's the same number as (and this can't be a coincidence) Fawlty Towers, the '70s John Cleese gem that pretty much summed up series farce and dared anyone to do better. Gervais and Merchant learned the lesson: Do it right, and leave it alone. (Both shows ran two seasons of six episodes each.)

Gervais and Merchant did come back to The Office one more time in that wonderful British tube tradition of the Christmas special -- a one-off summing up a show's essence, and airing around the holiday without necessarily having anything to do with it. But their movie-length series finale did, and it beautifully captured the warmth and reflection of the Christmas season, while sending David Brent off into his well-earned sunset. (The two would later turn the same trick with Extras.)

Lucky for us, The Office Christmas Special is on tap, too, airing this Sunday at 11 a.m.-1 p.m. ET on BBC America. If you haven't seen all of Gervais' Office, that's leaping ahead a bit, so record the special now and watch later, after you've seen all of adult swim's weekly episode airings.

The Office is on DVD, too, with excellent extras in which Gervais and Merchant riff on their writings in both funny and fulfilling ways. For its part, TV's adult swim block emphasizes how it's now more than animation with some fresh video from Gervais on its web site.

Nothing against NBC's Office, but Gervais' original really nails it. So hard it hurts.