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I don’t know about the rest of you, but my own life has been a series of defeats, humiliations, pratfalls, and disasters (and one or two of these have not even been my fault) against a background of tedium, boredom and neurotic dissatisfaction.

Is it any wonder that I am a fan of Extras?

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant could have called it quits after writing and directing (with Gervais starring in) the two brilliant seasons of The Office (UK). Thanks to the excellent American version of the show they probably would have been able to retire comfortably, and their place on Comedy Olympus would have been secure, because The Office was the ultimate workplace comedy, a show for anyone who’s ever worked at a boring job for an incompetent, self-deluded boss who thinks he’s funny but who isn’t; and isn’t this all of us?

But Gervais and Merchant didn’t retire, and they did an amazing thing, they went right out and created another series equally as brilliant: Extras.

Season One of Extras (which consisted of only six episodes) told the story of Andy Millman (Gervais) and his friend Maggie (Ashley Jensen), professional “background artists”. Fortyish, fattish and short (“Average height!” says he) bachelor Andy has quit his day job to pursue a career as an actor, and he takes any “extra” work he can get while hoping for a break into roles where he actually has a line or two. Maggie, who is painfully not bright but good-hearted, seems to have no ambitions beyond the extra work. Maggie is the downtrodden working-class girl who has always been downtrodden and accepts her lot; Andy is the working-class guy who cannot accept his lot, and who is willing to eat ungodly amounts of shit in hopes of one day not having to eat shit at all.

In each episode Andy and Maggie work with celebrated actors and comedians (Patrick Stewart, Kate Winslet, Ben Stiller, et al., all playing versions of themselves) who each prove to be as vile and stupid and vain as we somehow suspected and hoped they would be. Andy, who is not stupid, but who is increasingly desperate and occasionally lacking in social savoir-faire, meets crushing humiliation in each episode, and, much like in real life, he does not triumph at the end of each half-hour. But at least he has his friendship with Maggie, who seems to be interested in lots of handsome guys who come and go, but not, alas, in Andy, whose ongoing humiliation in the sexual department is to play the dreaded part of the clever but somewhat homely “friend”.

As season one goes on, it turns out Andy has written a pilot for a sitcom, hoping that writing his own vehicle will give him the boost that his hopelessly inept agent Darren (the very tall and very googly-eyed Merchant) seems temperamentally incapable of giving him. Miraculously, as the season ends Andy gets a deal to write and star in a series that sounds suspiciously like The Office.

Season Two, the six episodes of which have just come out on DVD, starts off with the shooting and airing of the première episode of Andy’s series, When the Whistle Blows.

This is Andy’s big break.

It’s all happening for him now.

Or is it?

Well, no, it isn’t.

You see, Andy wants to write and act in a show that isn’t shit. He wants no laugh track, no cheap jokes, no catch-phrases, no stunt-casting. Unfortunately, what the producers want is a laugh track and cheap jokes, catch-phrases (“Are you ‘avin’ a laugh?) and stunt-casting (bring on the dude from Coldplay), and then for good measure they toss in an awful curly wig and a pair of stupid glasses for Andy to wear.

Andy considers just pulling the plug on the show. This isn’t the show he wanted to do, and he says so to the producers. And they say, basically, “Fine, Andy. You can do that. And then you can go back to being an extra.”

I once found myself in this position, where some short pieces I created for a TV show were turning out not quite the way I envisioned them, to put it mildly. To tell the truth I couldn’t have pulled the plug even if I had the balls to do so, because I had signed a contract basically saying I’d surrendered my balls in perpetuity to the network, but I wouldn’t have pulled the plug anyway; I was quite willing to compromise. Which is what Andy does. In fact he surrenders, abjectly.

But Andy’s show, despite being crap, and because it is crap, becomes a hit. The critics hate it, he hates it, but the public loves it. And so his humiliation continues.

In the first season of Extras, Andy’s humiliations were on a small scale, although of course they were large-scale to him.

In the second season, Andy’s humiliation is on the air for millions to see every week. He’s making money, he’s befriending stars (if stars can be befriended at all, because all the stars that Andy meets are still the same sort of vile creatures he met when he was an extra) but he has even less self-respect than he had when he was working as a “background artist”. At least back then he had his dream of artistic success and fulfillment. Now he’s got his own show, but he knows it’s crap and so does anyone else with a lick of good taste. As he finds out one night when he slimes his way with Maggie into the VIP section of a fancy nightclub, and David Bowie himself takes to the piano and extemporizes a song on the spot about the “sad, fat little man” — Andy — a song which everyone in the club gathers around the piano to sing along to.

Welcome to success, Andy.

The season ends as the first one did, with Andy walking away from the camera with his dim but lovable friend Maggie. She suggests that if neither of them has met anyone in five years’ time, maybe the two of them should get together.

I hope they do. Meanwhile, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant have reportedly decided not to do a third season, but to wrap up the show with a one-hour Christmas special, as they did with The Office. It seems that they don’t want to take the chance of descending to the level of crap.

These guys would never make it in American TV.

(Another Newcritics exclusive, brought to you by the National Endowment for the Inhumanities. Thanks to Lance Mannion for the suggestion. Please go to my joint for more tales of humiliation and disgrace.)