ABSTRACT
The British (2001–2004) and American (2005–2013) versions of the mock-documentary sitcom The Office depict the workday routines of a paper company office located on the periphery of a major urban center, presided over by a boorish and delusional boss. The British Office, set at the Wernham Hogg company in the borough of Slough, featured cocreator and writer Ricky Gervais as boss David Brent; the American adaptation placed its Dunder Mifflin Company in the town of Scranton, PA, with Steve Carrell playing boss Michael Scott. Craig Hight suggests that the critical and popular success of both the British and American versions effectively defined for audiences “what television mockumentary should be … they have achieved the kind of status that This is Spinal Tap achieved for cinematic mockumentary.” 1 A televisual mock documentary differs significantly from a feature film, and Hight, Brett Mills, and other scholars have analyzed the show’s intersection of conventions derived from mock documentary film, docusoap, and sitcom, suggesting for it terms such as “comedy verité” or “mockusoap.” 2 In his analysis of documentary and comedy, Paul Ward briefly discusses the British Office as a variation on feature-film mock-documentary conventions. Drawing from Dan Harries’ work on parody, Ward points out that what differentiates the show from mock documentaries like This Is Spinal Tap is its lack of “the ‘logical absurdity’ that is often identified as a marker of parody—a sudden incursion of something that ruptures the verisimilitude and creates incongruity.” Ward suggests that “the humour derives from the programme’s sustained plausibility, rather than the alternation between plausibility and implausibility that is characteristic of parody more generally.” 3
