The Office

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.

Spinal Tap is where the mockumentary became a form people could copy. Rob Reiner's film fixed the whole grammar: a crew whose presence is acknowledged and never explained, talking-head interviews cut against what the camera catches, improvisation inside a written structure, and subjects who are funny because they are performing for a documentary they think will flatter them. Gervais and Merchant built The Office on exactly that gap between how David Brent believes he is coming across and what the footage shows, which is the Spinal Tap engine moved to an office. Filed MEDIUM: an inherited form, and the map already records what The Office then did to American television.