Ricky Gervais's Extras has been a very inconsistent series, lurching wildly from excellence to awfulness throughout its run, often several times in the same episode. At times, Extras is subtle, cutting and perfectly observed; at others it hits you with comedy broader and stupider than the broad and stupid sitcoms it despises. Characterisation is especially inconsistent. The central characters, Andy Millman (Gervais), an aspiring actor/writer who sold out to make a crap sitcom, and his best friend Maggie (Ashley Jensen), a failed movie extra, sometimes appear to be sensitive and intelligent people. And yet at other times they both required to be shockingly insensitive and stupid. These inconsistencies rarely come across as true character contradictions; we are not seeing different conflicting layers of the characters, revealed by the situations they find themselves in. Instead, we see characters behaving in random, ad hoc ways, contrived to suit the needs of whatever situation they are forced into. It becomes hard to imagine them as real people, or see Extras as a character-based comedy. Instead I prefer to see it as a show featuring Ricky Gervais in a series of related sketches, sometimes playing himself (or his persona), sometimes playing a broad David Brent-style comedy character.
The 90-minute Christmas special is one of the best entries in the series, but it's not immune from the same problems. And so we have the occasional by-the-numbers stretch of "embarrassment comedy"* where characterisation falls apart, such as the scene where Millman, in an attempt to impress a Guardian journalist, persuades an artificially-stupid Maggie to pretend to be his PA, with not very hilarious consequences. Fortunately there are fewer such scenes than usual, and the rest of the episode hits home with some sharply-observed humour.
The main gimmick of the series is the appearance of real-life celebrities in each episode, playing grotesque versions of themselves. Extras uses these appearances, and the increasing fame of the Millman character, to make some cutting points about the culture of celebrity; this is where the Christmas special is at its strongest. Millman finally ditches his incompetent agent to advance his career. His new agent advises him to get on the "B-list" by sleeping with the right well-used gossip column personalities; Millman counters that he doesn't want to get on the "Hepatitis B-list". Instead, he wants to achieve fame with integrity. But when his quest for integrity leads him to quit his sitcom, his career stalls and his TV appearances dry up. Millman is exasperated as he is increasingly pushed to the margins of the Ivy restaurant (a known celebrity hangout), and eventually isn't even allowed in. He becomes so desperate for popular attention that he lets his friendship with Maggie fall by the wayside. Finally he breaks down and tells his agent that he isn't interested in fame with integrity, but only in fame. The delighted agent swiftly books him an appearance on Celebrity Big Brother.
The Big Brother scenes are the high point of the episode, as the tawdriness and desperation of "reality" TV -- not to mention the production values -- are captured with dead-on accuracy. Millman finds himself trapped in a room with such luminaries as Lionel Blair, Lisa Scott-Lee and Chico (perfect choices!). Stuck with a bunch of attention whores and nonentities, and forced to do a series of demeaning tasks for the audience, Millman finally realises the hollowness of the lifestyle he pursued. He makes a damning speech about the culture that produces a spectacle like Big Brother, before storming out of the show to make a reunion with Maggie. "What are we doing, selling ourselves, selling everything?[...] Fuck you the makers of this show -- you can't wash your hands of this [...]. And fuck you for watching this at home". It's hardly the most original or subtle or timely criticism, but Gervais delivers it to perfection. There have been many parodies of Big Brother and other reality TV before, but this is the first I've seen that doesn't descend into absolute despair and misanthropy (as in Armando Iannuci's Time Trumpet) or treat the phenomenon uncritically or ambiguously (as with Catherine Tate or Peter Serafinowicz). Gervais's criticism is savage, coherent and humane.
Gervais, to his credit, is also not afraid to criticise his own fans, and some of the sharpest digs in the series are aimed at the comedy fan community. The Christmas special continues the trend of mocking the catchphrase-branded obsessives who hog the front rows of studio recording sessions. Gervais knows that fans are ten-a-penny, and that it doesn't pay an artist to put too much stock in them. Fans are not people who know you, they are not people who like you, and they are not people who care about you. The most die-hard ones are simply lost cranks who have latched onto something in order to give themselves an identity, the same people who would have become cultists in another age. Gervais knows that having fans is not in itself an achievement, and that he doesn't owe them a jot of his gratitude. Put any shit on TV, and some people will like it; put any shit on the web, and a bunch of dorks will lap it up and buy the T-shirt. If The Office had never been commissioned, his fans would simply be fans of other shit instead.
When Millman calls his studio audience a bunch of morons, he means it, and neither he nor Gervais show any contrition later on. A theme of the episode is that fame is turning Millman into an asshole, and I've seen this particular scene offered as an example. But in truth, it's not evidence that he is an asshole, but the opposite: a foreshadowing of his ultimate integrity. Millman has become an asshole because he has put fame -- which is to say, the adulation of a bunch of morons -- before his real friendship. He is an asshole not because he told his audience they were morons, but because he sold out to them in the first place.
Predictably, such an attitude causes outrage on the comedy message boards, where it cuts too close to the bone, and where Gervais has become a favourite punching bag over the last few years. Internet forumites are gravely offended when Gervais portrays the typical comedy fan as a greasy loser who calls himself "Count Fuckula"; they are furious when he portrays the studio audience as a line-up of fat uglies wearing "Am I Bovvered" T-shirts; and they even go apeshit when Millman says "shame on you" for watching Big Brother.
Millman and Gervais are right: shame on you if you watch Big Brother. It might seem inconsistent of me to say this, since I've argued elsewhere that people aren't really to blame for the mindless culture that is being foisted on them; indeed, this is a standard argument in socialist circles. The media is controlled by a small glut of companies offering only debased and frivolous shit; audiences are conditioned to like this stuff, and, working all day in tiring menial jobs, want to unwind and feel better about themselves by watching more debased and frivolous shit afterwards; a feedback loop results. I still believe there's something to this argument, but it can't be the whole story. After all, we have a World Wide Web that is not controlled by small glut of media companies, in which people can create and publish whatever they want. And what do they create? On the whole, they create debased and frivolous shit. The Web is still read by an audience with an intelligence and income level significantly greater than average, with a lot of time on their hands. But what do they spend their time looking at? On the whole, they look at debased and frivolous shit. Worst of all, most of these people know they're being fed shit, but they still lap it up, they still actively seek out more.
We now have the tools to liberate ourselves from media monopolies, to reclaim art and expression from its deadening corporate influence. But this is never going to happen while people are content with the second-rate, while people never push themselves, while people don't demand more of their cultural material. Gervais in Extras is clearly animated by a rage that so many people are content with crap. Whatever his reasons for this, I can only cheer him on.
* For anyone who likes embarrassment comedy, I can't recommend strongly enough the best example of the genre, and the funniest book ever written -- Notes from the Underground, by Dostoyevsky.