Imagine The Office if it weren’t a comedy, and you’ve got a rough idea of Sticks and Stones.
Sticks and Stones, a three-part ITV drama that becomes available Tuesday on BritBox, features much of the same outrageous and exasperating workplace behavior that made viewers nod in solidarity with the Office crew.
Except that, in Sticks and Stones, absurdity is supplanted by menace. The perpetrators of office bullying and stealth office politics, in this case, are often just arrogant and mean.
Thomas Benson (Ken Nwosu, top) heads a sales team at Clayton Office Solutions. The team works for weeks or months to tailor a product, and Tom is the closer, delivering the formal pitch that convinces the target organization to do the deal.
Tom has been there a while, the team likes him, and he’s good at what he does. As we join the story, he’s about to deliver a presentation to Murray Technologies, which would be a huge get for Clayton, and we see him walk into the meeting with a confident stride and the look of a winner.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t win. A technological glitch compromises his presentation, and he panics, shredding the pitch and putting the contract deal in serious jeopardy.
This not only concerns Tom’s boss Chris Carter (Ben Miller), but the rest of his team: Isobel Jones (Susannah Fielding), Andy Stocks (Sean Sagar), and Becky Mills (Ritu Arya).
If the deal had been sealed as expected, they all would have received substantial bonuses. No deal, no bonus, and suddenly their affection for Tom turns out to have been very wide and not very deep.
They begin a series of underhanded and rather nasty maneuvers designed to undermine him and eventually push him out. It’s the dark intersection where office politics becomes office bullying.
Some of the moves could, with a slightly different twist, fit into a sitcom. Viewers will, at times, laugh. But things get less and less funny for Tom, who only gradually understands the scope of what’s going on behind his back.
As he does, he keeps thinking there must be some way to stop it, either by conciliatory gestures or strong resistance. Either way, he’s pretty much wrong. The train is rolling.
In an interesting subplot that firmly establishes Tom as the sympathetic character in this scenario, he and his wife, Jess (Alexandra Roach), have a 7-year-old daughter who is deaf and is being bullied at school.
Tom’s advice to his daughter is as impulsive and ragged as his own strategy, and seeing how it plays out among children provides a great perspective on the adult drama.
A story about office politics sounds like niche stuff, and to an extent, it is. But Sticks and Stones creates a situation that will be recognizable to anyone who has ever worked in a place with more than, oh, three people. If there’s an element of competition, there can also be issues of trust.
It’s all structured and acted well, with enough suspense so viewers won’t be sure where it’s all headed. Sticks and Stones is the TV version of a satisfying quick read.