I haven’t watched the Office since I graduated college, but sitting here just now, I had some thoughts about the show that I had to get down.
From what I here the show is ending soon. It has a season or two left, and I was considering how it is going to end. In thinking about this, I came to a conclusion that I think is often ignored. The major conceit is of the Office is that this small paper company is being filmed for a documentary. This is conceit is also used in Parks and Rec and to a certain extent also in Modern Family. What I have never seen though is any of these shows take on what it means to be filmed as a documentary.
Who is funding the camera and editing team behind the Office? Are we meant to assume that because the show is edited that the events we are witnessing have already been filmed and ergo must be coming from the future, thereby making the Office the most subtle science fiction show in television history? Or are we watching the raw tapes and what we see as the Office will eventually be screened in some way?
If the second option is true, I can only imagine one extremely meta ending for the Office. At the end of the final episode in the middle of whatever plot point is occurring the police need to barge in, take all of the tapes of the documentary from the film crew, complain that they have never recieved any of the documentary that they promised to make, and the show should cut to black. This is not entirely unlike the ending to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
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