For many people, if they have created an iconic, critically acclaimed comedy TV series, they would have wallowed in its success and produced series until it was no longer popular. But Ricky Gervais is not many people and made the decision to stop The Office in its prime. Many people were horrified by this decision and had many doubts that he could ever follow up to the comedy that made his name but Extras was as good and for many, better than what Gervais had left behind. His second comedy is completely different and shows that Gervais has no fears about letting go of David Brent, instead Extras is more plot driven and has turned more towards conventional sitcom, not that you can"t still see Gervais and Stephen Merchant"s hilarious penchant for awkward situations, many involving a-list celebrities, be it racist towards Samuel L. Jackson or homophobic towards Sir Ian McKellan.
The plot throughout the first series follows Andy Millman, a failing actor who can only get work as an Extra thanks to his terrible yet hilarious agent played by Stephen Merchant. Accompanied by his hopeless romantic friend Maggie, who is sweet but incredibly stupid and often causes awkward moments as mentioned before, Gervais every episode fails to get any proper acting work, instead making more and more enemies out of celebrities until the final episode when his script for a sitcom is produced by the BBC. The next series then follows Andy as his TV program that he acts in gets increasingly worse, thanks to dumming down by BBC 2, a sly spoof of Extras real producers! Meanwhile Andy attempts to socialise with the rich and famous, David Bowie and Jonathon Ross for instance. The second series follows on perfectly from the first and is in every way just as good, but one thing that is noticeably different is that unfortunately Maggie has less screen time, replaced by the terrible agent. This is very big dilemma as both characters are hilarious and are begging for more screen time but ultimately Maggie is the superior character and lack of her presence is felt. However, both series are completely excellent, each episode is a work of comedy genius and if you do not like the plots then it is worth it just to see the many superstars happy to play themselves as monsters and idiots, possibly most memorable are Ben Stiller as the complete git, Kate Winslet as the foul mouthed sex monster and the annoying Daniel Radcliffe giving a performance ten times as good as he did in any of his other work!