‘The Office’ Co-Creator Stephen Merchant Has Explained Why He And Ricky Gervais ‘Drifted Apart’

Will Ferrell and Adam McKay made some of the best comedies of the 2000s, including Anchorman, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, and their masterpiece, Step Brothers. The creative partners even formed a production company together, Gary Sanchez Productions, but things got messy after McKay replaced Ferrell with John C. Reilly as former Lakers owner Jerry Buss in HBO’s Winning Time — news that Ferrell heard first from Reilly. “It was at this weird moment where Will and I weren’t exactly hugging each other, even though there was nothing that terrible, and [John] called Will and said, ‘Hey, McKay just came to me with this.’ And Will was very hurt that I wasn’t the one to call him, and I should have. I f*cked up,” McKay explained.

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant also made some of the best comedies of the 2000s, including The Office and Extras, before they “drifted apart.” But unlike Ferrell and McKay, there was no ugly break up. “I get on perfectly well with Ricky. I think we just started doing slightly different projects,” Merchant told the Daily Beast‘s The Last Laugh podcast.

He continued:

I returned to stand-up after a long time. And that led to my show, Hello Ladies, which I ended up developing in the U.S. And Ricky had a couple of other projects, one of which was called Derek, which he was doing at the same time I was doing Hello Ladies. So we just sort of got out of sync, really. I’ve had enormous success and fun working with Ricky, but I was starting to enjoy working with different people and different collaborators and finding new territory that I don’t think would necessarily have appealed to Ricky. And so we just sort of drifted apart creatively really, but we certainly never had any big falling-out or big argument or anything like that.

Merchant describes Gervais as having a “punk-rock sensibility,” whereas he’d “like to be let into the Establishment, please.” But if he wants some punk-rock cred, Merchant should agree to host the Golden Globes next year. That would be a real middle finger to his former-writing partner.