If you have exhausted your Office re-watches and are casting around for what comes next, David Brent: Life on the Road is the answer. The film, which picks up Brent’s story Rotten Tomatoes notes is set 12 years after the original series, does everything a good spin-off should: it takes a character you already know, strips away the context that defined him, and sees what is left.
For anyone who came to the UK original through the American version, or who watched both in sequence, David Brent will be a familiar but slightly sharper presence than Michael Scott. A bit less loveable on first pass, a bit more uncomfortable to sit with. That is precisely what makes the film worth your time.
What David Brent: Life on the Road Is Actually About
According to Wikipedia, the film was directed, written, and produced by Ricky Gervais, and released in the United Kingdom on 19 August 2016. The US release followed on 10 February 2017, according to IMDb.
Brent is no longer the boss. He is working as a sales rep, which places him in the exact position his old employees once occupied: miserable, treated poorly by colleagues, and with no obvious way out. Most people in that situation might quietly reflect. Brent, being Brent, does not. He empties his retirement funds, hires a band, and takes a short tour during his annual leave, chasing the music career that has lived entirely in his own head.
There is very little office in David Brent: Life on the Road, which is either a problem or the whole point depending on your patience for cringe comedy. The mockumentary format is intact. The obliviousness is intact. And, just as Michael Scott is slowly humanised across the US series, Brent goes through something similar here: a gradual, painful, occasionally funny reckoning with how he actually comes across versus how he imagines himself. It earns it, eventually.
Stream it on Netflix.
More Films for Office Fans to Work Through
If David Brent: Life on the Road sends you looking for more, there are several films that scratch a similar itch.
Office Space (1999) remains the definitive screen treatment of the grinding indignity of working life. It follows a man who decides his job simply does not matter and gets pulled into a ludicrous crime scheme in the process. The rage it channels is specific and recognisable in a way that still lands.
The Apartment (1960) is proof that office culture has been warping human behaviour for a long time. Jack Lemmon plays an ambitious clerk at a large insurance company who lets executives use his flat for their affairs, hoping to advance his career. Billy Wilder directed it as both a corporate satire and a love story, and the jokes hold up.
Clockwatchers (1997) is a quieter, odder film about long-term temp workers (a working experience that barely exists anymore) starring Toni Colette, Parker Posey, and Lisa Kudrow. If the appeal of The Office for you is the way it gets at the peculiar madness of dead-end work, this is the one.
Office Christmas Party (2016) is the chaos episode of The Office stretched to feature length. A branch manager and a CTO ignore orders to cancel the holiday party and push ahead to land a client. Property damage, arrests, and hospitalisations follow. It does what it says on the tin.
Waiting for Guffman (1997) is the purest mockumentary on this list, following a community theatre group preparing a show for their town’s 150th anniversary, led by the intense Corky St. Clair, played by Christopher Guest. Anyone who loved Michael Scott’s delusional confidence will find something very familiar here.
Start with David Brent: Life on the Road, though. Twelve years on from the original series, it turns out Brent has not changed at all, and that is both the joke and, quietly, the point.
