Explained: As The Office completes 20 years, revisiting what the show says about mockumentaries as a genre-Entertainment News , Firstpost
While it was the British version that gave the show its initial thrust, it was the 2005 American version that took the show and the mockumentary genre to unprecedented heights, helping it achieve cult status, and in many ways – global dominion.
During an Instagram chat session with Rainn Wilson of The Office fame, Billie Eilish, the 19-year-old multi-Grammy-winning pop sensation, confessed that she has watched the show 15 times, as of May 2020. And when Wilson jokingly told her to move on to some other show, Eilish replied: “I’ve tried, okay…I can’t do anything about it. This was the 15th time and every time I hit that episode that says ‘finale’, I’m always like, ‘Goddammit.’”
Eilish is one among millions of The Office fans across the globe. In a 2019 survey, sampled and studied by Nielsen, it was found that 3 percent of Netflix’s total user minutes in 2018 were spent watching the episodes of The Office, as published by the Wall Street Journal. It is is the most-watched show on the streaming network which boasts of some 15,000 titles from various corners of the world and has around 140 million subscribers.
Twenty years ago, on this date, The Office first saw the light of day when it premiered in the UK on BBC Two. Written, created and directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, The Office went on to become one of the greatest British sitcoms of all time. With the two six-episode series in the UK, opening to a lukewarm start, reaching a crazy high and then simmering down to eventual closure, the trajectory of The Office is quite similar to that of the mockumentary genre that the show introduced and popularised. Alison Herman of The Ringer mentions: “After being a new disruptive force, the genre has settled into a cultural presence with decades of foundation. And as ‘reality’ has become more entrenched, we’ve moved on from laughter to acceptance.”
While it was the British version that gave the show its initial thrust, it was the 2005 American version that took the show and the mockumentary genre to unprecedented heights, helping it achieve cult status, and in many ways – global dominion. So what is it that makes The Office strike a chord with people, especially with Gen-Z?
The Office and Mockumentary style: The ‘whats’, the ‘hows’ and the ‘whys’
What makes (or rather made) The Office work in the first place? Kevin Craft of The Atlantic says The Office “flipped the TV-as-a-distraction-from-real-life paradigm by setting the action in precisely the type of workplace many people long to escape.”
Mockumentaries essentially came into existence as a form of fiction that appropriates standard conventions and modus-operandi of non-fiction, and thus “mock” the very hallmarks of documentaries. The term ‘mockumentary’ became popular in the mid-1980s when American actor-filmmaker Rob Reiner used it to describe his 1984 directorial venture, This Is Spinal Tap which was about a popular English band going on tour.
And today with shows like The Office, Parks and Recreation and Modern Family the genre has found a space in every household.
The Office is set in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in the sales office of a nearly obsolete paper company, and its employees lead an equally morose existence. This wasn’t some figment of the show-maker’s imagination: It’s a fact that these ‘dead-end’ jobs often lead to equally dead-end lives of the employees. “Just as reality television soothes a viewer’s inner narcissist by telling stories of even more pronounced narcissists wreaking havoc on their surroundings, The Office made its audience feel better about their professional lives by showcasing a workplace with even drabber décor and more grating coworkers,” writes Kevin Craft.
It is the “boring regular-ness” that makes The Office so relatable. While the premise of the show revolves around the familiar mundane, the characters are the ones who add a sense of dynamics to their stagnant setting: they continuously strive to put their lives together and find some semblance of hope amid the obvious moroseness of their professional and personal worlds.
If it’s a mockumentary, then visual aesthetics take a backseat
The Office has hardly paid heed to the visual conventions of a regular American sitcom. Sonia Saraiya of Vanity Fair writes: “The Office offered an aesthetically challenged, humdrum existence — drab carpets, faux-wood interiors, glossy fake plants, and the oppressive, omnipresent fluorescence of a mass-produced life. The Office takes place amongst the detritus of late capitalism.”
In an interview with Us Weekly, John Krasinki revealed that much of the show’s popularity was because it also relied heavily on alternative viewing mediums and platforms. In fact, that is what saved the show from being axed right after its short first season. “We were one of the first big TV shows on iTunes . . . People were watching the show, like, in the subway. And that completely saved us, totally saved us. We built a sort of a cult group of amazing fans and from there, people actually started watching the show on television.”
The show’s popularity has also received a significant push from torrenting websites. Much before Netflix or any other streaming platforms were available in the Indian subcontinent, people downloaded TV shows, films et al from a gamut of torrenting websites. The Office was also among one of the most-watched shows on these websites. Even today, when The Office is off Netflix (in the US) and has moved to NBCUniversal’s Peacock, there has been a massive spike in the US piracy figures, reports Torrentfreak.com.
Is mockumentary still as popular and as relevant?
The Ringer’s Alison Herman writes that the rise of mockumentary was also largely dependent on technological improvisation in terms of the use of portable and budget-friendly equipment that democratised filming and hence added another layer of easy access and relatability to the audience. But today, it isn’t the case with smartphones and social media being at the fingertips of every other person on the streets. She writes, “ The intentionally janky look of the American Office, once jarring in the appearance-conscious context of broadcast TV, no longer squares with a time when TikTok has taught a generation of teens the fundamentals of editing and post-production. Much of reality has also lost the unvarnished look so many mockumentaries took as a jumping-off point.”
Also, the genre that came out as a bypass to reality television in the early 2000s, has now given birth to a variety of sub-genres that are distinct in their own ways. Be it Curb Your Enthusiasm, Arrested Development or even Veep — they can’t be really called mockumentaries. And today, as we live in a world where the most outlandish possibilities are turning out to be real, we as a race have evolved to accept the “reality” around us instead of mocking it and laughing the stress off.
