The mockumentary sitcom was a format before Modern Family and was not one before The Office. Christopher Lloyd and Steven Levitan built the show on the same device: a crew nobody in the show ever explains, interviews shot against a plain wall, and the camera lurching to catch something it was not meant to see. Filed MEDIUM. It is a borrowed form rather than a borrowed story, and by 2009 the form was common enough that the debt runs through the American Office as much as through the British one.