From The Office to Severance: how the fictional workplace went from bad to worse

In the final minutes of the final episode of the genre-defining mockumentary The Office, our favourite disenchanted worker, Tim (Martin Freeman), neatly summarises the banal rhythms of the early 2000s workplace. “The people you work with are people you were just thrown together with,” he muses, noting that he spends more time with colleagues than his own friends or family. “But probably all you’ve got in common,” he adds, rubbing his nose, “is the fact that you walk around on the same bit of carpet for eight hours a day.”

Ricky Gervais’s sitcom was rightly celebrated for its unvarnished depiction of the mundane, tedious and often soul-destroying reality of office life, but – hang on. Eight hours a day? Carpet? Twenty years and two recessions later, the monotonies of Tim’s office environment almost, regularly logging off at 8pm. And monitoring software means overworked and underpaid employees barely have time to stop for a natter, let alone set their co-worker’s stapler in jelly (for the third time).