Someone is making a documentary about Dunder Mifflin, but why?  This has always sort of bothered me about The Office.  After realizing that they were never going to explain what exactly was going on with the fake documentary that is the show’s premise, I eventually forgot about my qualms.

But seriously, who is filming these people?  What is the documentary about?  How come we never see the camera operators?  Are there a bunch of random people from a documentary crew that have been in the office along with the characters all of this time?

It obviously doesn’t matter because The Office is a great show and the documentary style works well for it.  Regardless, I was finally fully able to let go of these nagging thoughts after coming across Todd Jackson’s recent post on Dead Frog featuring an excerpt of an interview with Stephen Merchant from the upcoming book And Here’s the Kicker along with some of Jackson’s own analysis.

Here’s an excerpt from the excerpted Stephen Merchant interview. He talks a little bit about The Office‘s first fortunately unseen pilot:

The show just wasn’t funny if we were approaching it as a sitcom. It’s only amusing if you think of it as a real place being filmed by a documentary crew. The documentary seemed so vital at that point, because it seemed like all the jokes were dependent on the way that the character David Brent wanted to portray himself versus the way he was being portrayed by the documentary crew.

Another thing we did was remove the voice-over track with documentary-style narration. This helped, because in the end it meant there wasn’t an explicit editorial voice. This allowed David Brent to just dig his own grave.

Kicker is targeted to aspiring comedy writers, so that’s a great lesson for ‘em. Arguably most essential trait of The Office and Ricky Gervais and Merchant missed it when translating it the first time. Just a great lesson for just trying an idea – as a creator, how would you know the strict documentary feel was important for all the reasons Merchant outlines here? You’d probably only know if you’d seen The Office without them..

Good points, everyone.  I’m sold.  The Office does need to be a documentary.  David Brent/Michael Scott’s attempts at coolness and failure to hide the shortcomings that embarrass him from the cameras are crucial to making the show funny and the character relatable, now that you mention it.

Differences between how a character wants to portray himself to a documentary crew versus how he ends up coming across are also a significnt source of jokes in the Australian comedy Summer Heights High which recently started airing in the U.S. on HBO.  Like David Brent and Michael Scott before him, drama teacher Greg Gregson inflates his popularity and importance for the cameras.  Mr. G goes on and on about how he is a professional-level performer, yet he’s stuck teaching theater at a public high school.  Mr. G is a legitimately funny character though he doesn’t quite have the earnestness of a Michael Scott, someone who I couldn’t help constantly thinking about when watching the pilot episode of Summer Heights High.  I wonder if all documentary-style series will be haunted by The Office.  Does this format call for specific jokes?  And have they all been made already in a funnier way by Michael Scott?

Probably not.  The other two main characters on Summer Heights High – private school exchange student Ja’mie and passionate delinquent Jonah – are completely fresh takes on the rich girl and bad kid characters.  Ja’mie’s tendency to incorrectly blurt “random” and “no offense” and Jonah’s small but infuriating rebellions that leave his teachers powerless are spot-on portrayals of annoying teenage behavior that are rarely depicted on TV.

Chris Lilley as Mr. G in HBO's Summer Heights High

Unlike The Office, Summer Heights High includes an explanation before each episode noting that it is part of a documentary based on footage filmed at a public high school over the course of one term.  (It is not.)  Despite this initial presentation of the show as real, all three of the main characters are played by the show’s creator, Chris Lilley.  Having the same grown man play three characters, two of whom are children, one of a whom is a girl, gives the show a fairly silly tone that differentiates it from its fake documentary predecessors.

Lilley has won me over with Ja’mie and Jonah, and I have a feeling that as I keep watching Summer Heights High, I’ll get over my Michael Scott hang-up the same way that with The Office I eventually got over my concerns about its documentary style.  But maybe it will take less than five years.

Ariel Karlin is a Barnard College junior majoring in English and film.  She is the Co-President of CTV.  Everybody and Television runs every Wednesday.