The Office-ification of Everyday Life
How The Office Shaped The Dealership and Why We Still Crave Deadpan Comedy
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It has been over a decade since the US version of The Office stopped producing new episodes, and yet, it has never been more popular. Stunningly, some of its biggest fans were barely alive when it went off the air in 2013. Thanks to streaming, memes, and shows bearing a strong resemblance to its mockumentary format (looking at you Modern Family, Parks & Recreation, What We Do in the Shadows, etc.), The Office and its deadpan but earnest style are still very much with us.
I hadn’t really thought about The Office much at all but for the emergence of what is now one of my favorite “shows,” the Mohawk Chevrolet series The Dealership on TikTok. (You can watch all the episodes on YouTube here). There, the 23-year-old digital branding director named Grace created a sensation with millions of views by turning what could have been a commercial into a bonafide hit show. In episodes of only a few minutes, she leads a team of her fellow employees at the dealership in unhinged efforts to market Chevy cars. One of my favorite episodes has her trying to market a Blazer to “the female gaze.” As the series became super popular, of course, corporate had to get involved, resulting in my fave episode so far, “Mohawk Goes to Corporate.” In this episode, Grace gives a presentation to corporate to rebrand the Silverado. It involves Comic Sans and is simply amazing.
I am not the only person who now lives for new episodes of this show, or even its “reruns.”
In a later episode, Grace (in character as “Grace,” a camp version of herself) notes that she was inspired to make a theme song for Mohawk Chevrolet after a “spiritual experience at a Dave Matthews concert” which felt very “I feel God in this Chili’s.” (A line I think about all the time.)
So why is it that the earnest/deadpan tone of The Dealership and its inspo, The Office, are hitting so hard now? Why did a car dealership turn to a decade-old show to sell itself?
The Office, and sitcoms generally, offer a knowable form of comfort. Viewers know that in thirty minutes, they will see characters they feel like they know who get into low-stakes scrapes and reach some kind of resolution by the end of each episode. Sure, there may be some cliffhangers to keep you watching (Jim and Pam, will they or won’t they? Or should we just focus on Karen who seems pretty amazing?) but generally speaking, there will not be any major trauma or tension that leaves viewers reeling. The same could not be said for The Sopranos which I am inexplicably rewatching now and also finding some comfort in that I cannot fully explain.
The pandemic saw a massive spike in viewership of The Office and a riot when the show got pulled from Netflix and put on Peacock (resulting in people caring about Peacock for the first time in *checks notes* human history). I also did a rewatch of The Office during the pandemic and found comfort in the Dwight and Angela’s strangeness, Kelly’s business bitch persona, and favorite episodes that I knew would make me laugh (like “Dinner Party,” my favorite episode).
While an office park in the middle of some anonymous area may not be anyone’s fantasy, it also created this new cosplay of what workplaces used to be like “before.” I don’t mourn the loss of going to the office everyday, but during the pandemic I could appreciate the comfort of seeing people in everyday life who were neither friends or family. I didn’t realize the ways I’d miss acquaintances or even the strangers I passed on my way to work regularly, wondering how they were. When I was in graduate school, I taught with someone who I was convinced wore the same pair of black jeans everyday (no judgement). I didn’t really know him at all and always had pleasant conversations with him en route to class, but in my mind he existed as the man who wore only one pair of Levi’s for reasons I couldn’t understand. I used to fantasize about leaving a piece of chalk on his chair to mark the jeans, hoping to figure out if it was the same pair every day or if he owned multiple pairs of these jeans. Again, this couldn’t matter less and probably marks me as a sociopath on some kind of personality quiz, but this is the kind of workplace nonsense I found myself missing during Covid.
Having talked to a lot of college kids at work these days who now also love The Office (and The Dealership), I have been interested to hear what draws them to watch. Beyond the comfort of a reliably funny show, they seem fascinated by a world where no adults seem to care if their job is their passion. College freshmen feel pressure from day one to pick the right major, do the right activities, get in the right networks, all in pursuit of a coveted job that must also align with their passions and be meaningful. As Amy Wharton, a professor of sociology who published extensively on American work life told Emily St. James for Vox: “Young people are being told, ‘You can’t just get a job, you have to find a job that fulfills you, that you’re passionate about. . . There’s a lot of pressure on people to invest in themselves and work at something that expresses their values, but it’s really hard to find that,” Wharton noted, citing the decline in full-time jobs with benefits.
The Office offers an alternative, if increasingly difficult to find path. No one at Dunder Mifflin is passionate about paper, except perhaps Dwight who is mocked for this trait. What is cool is pulling pranks, not being seen caring too much, and prioritizing instead the life you make outside of work. Having both the stability of office work and that community with a social life outside it untouched by pandemic or politics must seem ideal to anyone who didn’t live through the bootcut jean era of the early 2000s, which is not something I am not willing to romanticize.
Even if office life has never been my dream, it’s interesting to note that for someone like Grace Kerber, herself a recent college graduate who landed a full-time job with benefits, it is appealing to people for whom American work culture prior to the pandemic may feel like historical reenacting.
The earnestness with a smirking tone that I see in The Dealership, The Office, and other shows like it presents a knowing eyeroll at the frustrations of work life while also celebrating the community at its core. I think that is in part why The Office continues to find an audience. Everyone wants to feel like they know a Dwight, Kelly, or Michael in their office, class, or neighborhood. The people that make up the outer rings of our networks, not the family or friends, but the people who post on fb sharing vacation pics with people they only know from high school are what make people feel both known and knowable to each other. They present a map of contexts and communities that we are maybe only tangentially a part of, and yet somehow still invested in.
I think it’s this sense of presumed intimacy that makes the “office-ification of everyday life” so rampant. The US Office diverged from the British Office by bringing in cameramen from reality tv to frame the testimonial shots to resemble those from reality tv and not the awkward extreme closeups of the British version. That small choice (and undoubtedly many others) made audiences feel like characters who were strangers were still talking only to them, letting them in on their secrets (again the Jim and Pam testimonials will stay with me forever), and frustrations. We felt like we knew these lovable weirdos, and that undoubtedly sold the show to us even if the mundane set of an office felt too real and unappealing to people working in one themselves.
This focus on things that feel real and sincere while allowing for the absurdity of life is what makes this approach to writing (and apparently selling cars) work so well. Mohawk Chevrolet could have sold cars on social media through direct pitches or highlighting the cars themselves. Instead, they presume people are tired of a phony pitch and lean deeply into another kind of phoniness, the fake but sincere mockumentary of their own jobs. As Grace revealed in an interview in the Link in Bio newsletter, the marketing department wanted customers to get a sense of the people at the dealership and form connections with them. “If someone wants a new car or more specifically a new Chevy,” she noted, “they are going to get one, but what we ask ourselves when making our content is how do we make them want to buy from Mohawk specifically.” Even if Grace is playing a Michael Scott-inflected version of herself designed to entertain, the fact that she could come up with these improvised quips and is willing to make fun of herself is exactly the kind of appealing image that has won the dealership fans and customers.
Is any of this “real?” and does any of that matter? I refuse to engage philosophy because every philosophy major I’ve ever encountered has burned me or given me heartburn, but I will say that the “Office-ication” of everyday life works best not when it leans into mockumentary explorations of the mundane, but when it offers a sincere (if fake) attempt to hold up the everyday details of life and invites us to laugh at the absurdity of it all.
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