Comment on “Twenty Twelve”: If Michael Scott ran the Olympics

Having played the stuffy, occasionally amusing paternal head of Downton Abbey, Lord Grantham, Hugh Bonneville is perfectly suited to play the stuffy Head of Deliverance for the Olympic Deliverance Commission, the agency charged to help plan the huge games in London this summer. But in the sharp BBC comedy series “Twenty Twelve,” just now getting to the States, the shambling occurs all around him: a public relations “branding” expert who can’t stop jabbering nonsense, a facilities chief who can’t keep his mind on one topic, a secretary who serves him too well, a wife who despises him. All the while, he’s trying to keep up the old stiff upper lip as he tries to get through each useless week when he knows they’ve gotten no closer to addressing the kind of systematic problems the 2012 Olympics will likely cause in London’s East End when the games open in less than a month. From John Morton, creator of “People Like Us,” “Twenty Twelve” is the funniest British satire since “The Office,” and it's done in very much the same faux-documentary style (with the interviewer’s questions now being occasionally heard, or his camera at one point being knocked out of his hands).