The Office, Parks & Recreation, & Brooklyn Nine-Nine are some of the most well loved TV shows of all time let alone of the last 20 years.

But they all have an inherent issue in their premise that I think, despite what charm each has, has really done a number on American culture.
Let's start with The Office.

The show's premise is that it's a documentary about the day to day goings on inside a paper company. And while it pioneered the mockumentary format it owes its origins to the UK version of the show.

And that's crucial to the issue these shows share.
I won't get into the differences between UK media & US media, but suffice to say the first season of the US Office was almost a direct remake of the UK one. The first episode was practically a shot for shot redo.

And... the US Office famously almost got canceled for that in S1.
The show had poor ratings, poor reviews, & hardly connected with a US audience.

And the reason which far better media analysts have noted in much greater detail is that US audiences don't connect as well with the more brash, dry British humor & rougher characters in the show.
So, S2 of the US Office comes & guess what?

Michael Scott no longer is balding. He's a little nicer, he's more human, he's not some monster.

And they also began focusing on what would become the heart of the show: Jim and Pam's romance.

And it became a hit & ran for 9 seasons.
But this isn't about any of that.

This is about the show's foundation, it's inherent bias.

The premise.

The Office is a parody of office life. At its best it is able to both say "Hey isn't office work shitty" while also finding the humanity in it as well. And that's the issue.
Many have noted that Hollywood loves itself a good white genius asshole anti-hero. From Sherlock to Breaking Bad to Rick & Morty to the Sopranos, it's a well worn trope at this point that that type of character is a direct product of how homogeneous Hollywood's showrunners are.
Which is to say: how white, cis, hetero, & middle aged they are.

And that goes for those who ran & created The Office, Parks & Rec, & B99 as well.

While it's true that each show did have some diversity in the writers room these shows were conceived by 3 middle aged white guys.
The Office was developed by Greg Daniels, who along with producer & writer Michael Schur would go on to make Parks & Rec with, who after finding his footing & comfort, would go on to work with Dan Goor to create Brooklyn 99.

And their bias shows in what they decided to make.
Once The Office found its footing, it realized what it needed to be. And it couldn't be "gosh isn't office life terrible?" That'd worked for a limited series UK TV show, but if they wanted legs to run, it had to have something more to it.

Thus, it began to humanize everything.
The Office cast grew in depth of character. Nuance was added. And in between the cringe comedy & "isn't office life terrible," there developed a sort of romanticism of it as well.

"Look as these folks. They're like you, getting through it all. Some are even trying their best."
That's something that Schur really took & executed well in Parks & Rec.

Ask any Parks & Rec fan what their least favorite season is & they'll likely answer S1.

That's because S1 was still trying to be The Office. It wasn't until S2 that the cringe became secondary to the show.
And then the show grew up. It gave its characters of color a more predominant role. It leaned into longer term conflict & tried to stray away from conflict for the sake of conflict.

And it gave us Leslie Knope: a strong smart liberal who gave her all because people deserve good.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine might be the most evident example of the issue of premise that I've seen (have you spotted it yet?).

It's a police procedural unafraid to poke fun at cop drama but includes the most diverse cast of any of the three shows mentioned. It's witty, charming, & fun.
And it too humanizes its characters in many ways.

But that's the issue.

Because the characters it chose to humanize, the perspective it's foundationally built upon, is making cops likable.

Just like Parks & Rec made politicians likable.

And the Office made companies likable.
Each of these 3 shows has taken a look at the 3 most powerful structures in US society & chosen both to poke a bit of fun at them... but chosen mainly to romanticize them in some way.

Each show is basically "Not All Bosses/Politicians/Cops."

These are the good apples, they say.
And I think about The West Wing, another one of the most beloved TV shows of all time who practically paved the way for the success of these 3 shows. A show that humanizes the Presidency & shows what a US President at their best should look like...

From a liberal point of view.
But.

None of these are reality.

They are all fiction in more detached sense.

Because nowhere in America has there been a department that's operated like B99. Nowhere has there been a small town government that's been Pawnee, Indiana. The Office never existed.

But thing is?
These shows made it FEEL like they should.

The mockumentary style lends them a gigantic amount of immersion to audiences, because the characters seem so much less like characters & much more like people. You'll hear it in the way fans of these shows will talk about the cast.
Hearing The Office fanboys back in high school felt like I was hearing my friends talk about some other set of friends, not about a TV show.

The premise & format of this kind of TV causes people to be very susceptible to its message.

Trust me, I love Parks & Rec. But still...
They're all problematic.

At a foundational level, what they've done is excused the reality of politics by conjuring up its best case scenario.

And I don't know how many of you are history buffs, but history is not kind to best case scenarios.

See example: COVID-19 in the US.
What these kinds of shows have done is lie to us. Not a lie in the usual way that art tries to trick you with to allow for suspension of disbelief, but lie about what is possible in the given framework of our society.

Could all 3 shows be made reality? Yeah.

But they haven't.
I don't think its a coincidence that all 3 of these shows had their heydays during the Obama era, a time where - still reeling from the atrocities of Bush & the Recession - for the first time in a while, things seemed to be at least looking up in the US.

But they really weren't.
The issues were made light of, even by some of these shows.

I think of the Parks & Rec episode about the Men's Rights movement Pawnee encounters.

The MRAs are treated mostly as a benign annoyance to be dismissed.

That episode aired a year after the 2014 Isla Vista killings.
These shows helped shape the way for how the modern left approaches politics. It's about compromise, hard work, & getting along.

And look where we are now.

But there is one show that I think does what all shows were trying to do, but better.

Let's talk about Letterkenny.
Letterkenny, in case you aren't familiar, is a sitcom about life in rural Canada. And you'd think there'd be nothing no more of a potentially conservative premise than that one.

But it is the complete opposite.

Letterkenny is a complete autopsy on the rural Canadian lifestyle.
It talks about drug use. It takes about sex. It talks about settler-colonialism. It talks about relationships, masculinity, friendship, and all sorts of other topics. It does so so rapidly many watch it with subtitles even though its in English.

And it talks about politics.
There is an episode of Letterkenny that explicitly talks about the Alt-Right. It's played for laughs, but the humor isn't at the expense of making light of neo-Nazis.

No, it more comes from the fact that the issue the Alt-Right is trying to make in town... nobody cares about.
The AR protests the name change of a sports field from its First Nations namesake. A group of AR people, all dressed in slacks, with tiki torches, and buzz cuts, show up in the freezing snow.

And no one's there to anti-protest them because everyone's fine with the name change.
And an American show might's ended there. A cold field full of AR folk freezing, with all the main cast inside just contentedly ignoring them.

But Letterkenny didn't stop there.

Letterkenny had the Indigenous characters confront the freezing AR protesters in the field.
And when things escalate to the point that the AR guys want to throw down, guess what happens?

The entire town bands together and beats the shit out of them in a nearly minute long fight montage set to beautiful classical music.

And that shit is pure, beautiful art, I'll say.
Letterkenny is perhaps one of the biggest shows to ever come out of Canada. And there's stuff that's wrong with it, just like there's stuff wrong with Canada itself.

But Letterkenny, a show nominated for not only best comedy but best show, is very different from US sitcoms.
And here's my point.

Media shapes us. It shapes our society, it shapes our culture.

It isn't by accident The Office, Parks & Rec, and B99 were made by 3 white middle aged guys. They did push the envelope forward, in good ways.

But they also held it back.

And lied about it.
You can love them, but it's nearly impossible not to acknowledge that they are both a product & influence on the weakness of liberalism.

They are the centrist compromise.

They haven't criticized America's instituations.

They've given them a false smile & best case scenario.
I hope, when we're out of quarantine, we'll see a shift that can help us produce shows like Letterkenny, maybe even better.

I hope fewer middle aged white guys run things in Hollywood.

It would be nice to think that's what will happen.

But that's the best case scenario.
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