Television - Ricky Gervais's celebrity satire is a little bit too smug, writes Andrew Billen Extras (BBC2)

One of the tricks The Office managed to pull off was dispelling the fallacy that you cannot make interesting programmes about dull places. Television series about work usually confine themselves to law enforcement or life saving. Most sitcoms eschew the nine-to-five for the dramas of the domestic sofa. The Office, acknowledging that most of us spend as much time with our work colleagues as with our families (if we have them), demonstrated that, on the contrary, eccentricity positively flourishes amid quotidian drudgery.

Film sets, the location for Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's new sitcom, are also notoriously dull places. Actors joke that they deliver their performances for free but get paid for all the hanging around. They are, however, more immediately interesting than a paper supplies office in Slough. We are, after all, within earshot of the world of show business and celebrity. Although Gervais and Merchant set out to subvert the fame game, even the Radio Times was not above running a front-cover list of Extras celebrity cameos during the next six weeks: Kate Winslet, Samuel L Jackson, Ben Stiller, Vinnie Jones and so on; and since during Live 8 Madonna announced her devout wish to work with Gervais, we may expect her to turn up for series two.

In other words, whereas it seemed The Office was about to flop (and it was actually disliked by focus groups), there is very little chance of Extras (Thursdays, 9pm) failing to be extremely successful with audiences - if only for the chance to gawk at the famous slumming it on cult TV. In the first episode, Ben Stiller did not disappoint, with a wonderful alternative version of himself as a boastful comedy actor determined to prove his credentials as a serious director with a harrowing Bosnian war film, in which he displays a version of the brutality he believes he is exposing.

Faced with the possibility of being typecast as David Brent, one of television's most indelible monsters, Gervais has thus shifted the spotlight away from Andy Millman, the character he plays in the new series. He shares top billing with Ashley Jensen, who plays Andy's fellow extra Maggie Jacobs with perhaps unwise quantities of Scottish charm. Maggie has no ambitions in the business, but sees location shoots as promising hunting grounds for a husband. She can find men, all right, but she cannot keep them. Reasons spring to mind: she is sexually naive, rather stupid and, actually, not very nice. In the opener, she rejects a possible mate because he has one leg shorter than the other and wears a shoe "like Herman Munster".

Andy is harder to work out, because Gervais and Merchant go to some lengths to differentiate him from David Brent. He has lost the beard and, more remarkably, his supernumerary nipple. He makes jokes that people actually laugh at. Unlike David Brent, he is not a coward, and defends Maggie when the tyrannical Stiller turns on her. "Who do you think I am?" demands Stiller, who has established that Andy is a "nobody". "It's either Starsky or Hutch. I can never remember," he replies.

Unfortunately, under pressure, Andy turns into Brent, making racist remarks, mocking the disabled, failing to empathise with suffering, creeping up to power and lying unconvincingly. It is a funny act, but one we have seen before. Perhaps we should not ask Gervais to be different in every role: character actors do not need to be. But Andy Millman is an attempt at variation that does not quite work.

Thus we are left, for our main characters, with a woman whose characteristics are too narrowly delineated (ditsy man-chaser) and a man whose personality is barely worked out beyond the basic motivation that he wants to graduate to speaking roles. Even stuck in the shadowy wings of each episode, these weaknesses are noticeable. In the second programme, Merchant, who plays Andy's hopeless agent, in fact shows more promise.

Maggie and Andy, representing failure, may not be nice people but, quelle surprise, are not quite as bad as the personifications of success. In the three episodes I have seen, Stiller is a sanctimonious boor, Ross Kemp is a boastful coward and Kate Winslet a mucky mouth who takes a role in a Holocaust movie as a short cut to an Oscar. These star turns, however expertly executed, cannot help but be a little smug and self-serving. If Stiller is willing to send himself up as a bully, then surely he can't be one. So far the cameos are less interesting than those by, say, David Duchovny on The Larry Sanders Show or Ted Danson on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

It would be ingratitude itself not to acknowledge that this series is beautifully written, performed and directed. The clips from the spoof films are, for example, very well done. But there is less to it than you might hope. The thought that Maggie and Andy may be extras in their personal and professional lives is largely neglected. The show is less naturalistic than some recent TV comedy and this is not only, I think, because it is not intended to look like a documentary. The bad-taste jokes - about a Bosnian widower in the first show and, later on, about disability - seem a little forced. We want more of Gervais, and he seems determined to give us less.

So, no, since you ask: it is not as good as The Office.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

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