A couple years after the fact, Ricky Gervais can laugh a little bit at his hubris.

When he and co-creator Stephen Merchant pitched the BBC on a comedy, shot like a documentary and featuring no laugh track or well-known actors, they had the attitude of "I'd rather it not be done than have it ruined."

"I suppose looking back a chill goes down the spine that I could have called their bluff, and they call mine and say 'Okay, we don't need it then,'" Gervais says. "But they seemed to go for that, really."

Lots of other people have gone for it as well. Gervais' and Merchant's creation, "The Office," has become a big hit in the United Kingdom and has developed a loyal Stateside following via BBC America. The show's first season is now available on DVD, and the second began airing on BBC America last week.

Gervais says his take-it-or-leave-it stance on the show came largely from the fact that he and Merchant were TV outsiders. They'd worked together at a London radio station, where they developed a "Seedy Boss" character that eventually became David Brent, the insufferable paper-supply company manager who's at the center of "The Office."

"I suppose I thought of it like easy come, easy go," says Gervais, who plays Brent. "I wasn't one of those people who'd been slogging around doing stand-up for 15 years in pubs or gone to stage school or anything like that."

As the idea for "The Office" was gestating, British TV was going through a glut of reality shows and "docu-soaps." Gervais noticed how the subjects of these shows, not familiar with cameras following them, seemed to try very hard to come across as interesting and likable.

"It was a very Andy Warhol sort of situation going on there," he says. "It seemed to be the vehicle that would carry it, the fake documentary. ... We tried to let people realize that normal people, when given a platform, can be doing it for the wrong reasons. David Brent is doing it for the wrong reasons."

For all of David's petty politicking and cringe-worthy behavior, Gervais doesn't see him as a fundamentally bad person. "He's just a bit of a fool, really. He's free-falling and grabbing for branches, and I suppose his worst crime is that he's mistaken popularity for respect. ... He's not a bad man, just wounded."

The documentary conceit also means that David and the rest of the "Office" staff are more likely to be caught when they do something embarrassing. As Gervais notes, "We all make faux pas, we say silly things every day ... there's just not usually a national film crew there."

Finally, the mockumentary style allows Gervais to keep traditional sitcom devices, which he says he'd grown tired of seeing, out of the show's realm. Humor comes from the very fact that the cast is playing normal people who aren't likely to be tossing out punchlines when the cameras are rolling.

"I had a big list of 'don'ts' as opposed to a big list of 'dos,'" He says. "I didn't want a laughter track. ... I didn't want it to be a vehicle for famous people to walk in, do their schtick and walk off. I wanted it to be real."

NBC is now developing an American version of "The Office," with "King of the Hill" co-creator Greg Daniels writing the pilot. Gervais and Merchant are serving as consultants. The style of the U.S. version is likely to be similar to the original, but Gervais thinks it should otherwise adopt its own identity.

"It's by no means my baby -- I'm even flattered they're letting me dabble and stick in my two penny worth," he says. "... Little bits and pieces can be different. It's got to be more than changing 'tap' to 'faucet' and 'tomato sauce' to 'ketchup,' otherwise you might as well just show the English version and hand out a glossary."

Daniels and the NBC folks might do well to keep in mind one of the things Gervais does with David.

"I try to make the people at home feel his pain a little, feel embarrassed." Gervais says. "If someone's embarrassing himself, everyone in the room is embarrassed. ... What can you do? You don't just laugh and point, you sort of go 'Oh God.' You're nearly as embarrassed as them, and that's what we try to make the audience feel. Just slightly uncomfortable."