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When it was first announced that NBC would produce an American adaptation of the hit BBC sitcom The Office, we wondered who in North America they could possibly find to play a U.S. equivalent of Mackenzie Crook's Gareth Keenan. It's a genius performance -- an officious prig, with an undercurrent of impotent menace -- but it would be hard to bring such a character across the Atlantic, where menace is so seldom impotent. Also, like all toadies, Gareth is self-important yet needy; he's basically pathetic. We invisioned, perhaps, Jason Segel in the role, although his character Eric on the late Undeclared suggested that he was possibly too free with his emotions; Gareth is completely repressed, which is why he's completely ineffectual. They needed someone who could glare, nurse grudges, seek pitifully meaningless advantages over his co-workers, creep everyone out with his social retardation, but never actually explode into public rage. They needed Rainn Wilson, and thank God they got him.

The weirdest thing about all-'round weirdo-portrayer Rainn Wilson is that his name is "Rainn." This is the sort of handle that belongs on members of the Phoenix family, or cashiers at Whole Foods, not a tall, doughy white guy with suspicious, beady eyes and a squirrelly demeanour. Rainn Wilson's not mellow or laid-back; he's intense, and he's right in your face. Close enough for you to touch foreheads, possibly.

Plus -- irrespective of how queer it is to name a child after a natural phenomenon, Gwyneth -- isn't "Rainn" a little bit of a girly name? Rains Pryor and Phoenix are both of the female persuasion. When we saw the name "Rainn Wilson" scroll by in the closing credits of Almost Famous, we never imagined that it could belong to the mustachioed, large-foreheaded stooge hanging around behind Ben Fong-Torres in the Rolling Stone office. And even in that setting -- as redolent of pot and patchouli as it must have been in reality, back in the '70s -- Wilson managed the impossible by looking square. The girl can't help it.

Once we figured out that Rainn Wilson was not, in fact, one of Stillwater's Band-Aids, we came to appreciate him. We enjoyed it when he brought his special brand of staring weirdosity to Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, certain even as detectives questioned him about nursing-home rape that he couldn't have done it because he was far too obvious a suspect. Sexual assault of a woman -- even one in a coma, as occurred in this particular episode -- is also too run-of-the-mill for a Rainn Wilson character; we suspect that his sexual proclivities have more in common with Troy McClure's. (We did see a still from last year's Baadassssss!, depicting Wilson in what appears to be a four-gy situation, and we're still not sure how to feel about it, except disturbed. And dubious.)

Wilson's sexlessness on screen was also a story point over the past couple of seasons of Six Feet Under, in which he played Arthur, the mortuary assistant. I'll admit it: I really loved Arthur. Every line he delivered made me laugh; Wilson seemed to have a lot of fun playing someone so odd. Unlike earlier Wilson characters, whose awkwardness manifests itself as prickly distrust, Arthur was gentle and sweet, and just wanted so badly to fit in with the Fishers, both the business and the family. He was still a weirdo, don't get me wrong, but his weirdness dovetailed nicely with that of Ruth (Frances Conroy); when she actually went to the trouble of drawing up a schedule to ensure that they'd never have to share the kitchen at mealtimes, he wasn't put off: he actually complimented her foresight -- and not sarcastically, either. When the two started an extremely tentative love affair, it seemed right. Weirdly right, of course, but still. And for the record, I never thought Arthur was to blame for gift-wrapping poo and leaving it around the Fisher manse to terrorize his ex Ruth and her new husband George: Arthur was far too modest about bodily...things and -- though weird -- too benign to do something that hostile. (I did think David might be anal enough to express his feelings in a concomitantly fecal manner.)

Dwight Schrute, however? Dwight might leave a steamer in a decorative tin on someone's doorstep. Or desk. Wilson's character in the American Office is nothing if not hostile, and craven enough to punish his opponents in such a personal, if anonymous way. After the few episodes that have aired so far, the series still hasn't found its groove; mostly, it makes us want to watch the British version of The Office, since the American one resembles it just enough to remind us of the original, but not enough to be as satisfied by the duplicate. However, Wilson's character is the funniest: like Gareth, he's a humorless, uptight stickler who knows he's the butt of the office's jokes, but doesn't know the extent to which they're fucking with him, because it's pretty much happening around the clock, and he's too oblivious to notice. He knows to be pathologically suspicious of everyone around him, but not precisely why. No one's motives are as dark as those he imputes to them: he thinks his co-workers are gunning for his job, and they just want to put his stapler in Jell-O. The satire of The Office only works to the extent that its characters are recognizable, and their actions recognizably cringe-worthy, and Wilson's Dwight succeeds brilliantly in this regard: the viewer laughs partly out of relief that her own resident office weirdo isn't nearly as weird as he, because no real person could ever be as weird as a Wilson character, and the fact that he can play them so hilariously must mean he's profoundly normal in real life. Mustn't it? Either that, or he's the weirdest person ever to draw breath, and maybe we secretly hope it's the latter.