As a queer television scholar, I first became interested in Downton Abbey because of the character of Thomas Barrow (played by Rob James-Collier). The show’s treatment of his sexuality became particularly interesting to me in the third season, when he is outed as gay but not banished from the Downton estate. I started wondering through what lens is this character informed? My own research places Thomas, as well as a cluster of queer characters that have emerged on contemporary television set in the historical past, as informed by post-gay ideology. I also have argued that the insertion of gay themes in television programming set in the historical past is a strategy used by showrunners and industry insiders to capitalize on the interests of contemporary “savvy” viewers. I’m also interested in how the Downton Abbey merchandising empire is spared the fate of being equated with “crass commercialism.” Similarly, Downton is rarely compared to the less prestigious television “soap” format (with which it shares much in common). I argue that the show’s appeal to upper class taste aesthetics as well as its role as a form of gay consumer culture has significant impact on its prestige. That said, Thomas has become a fascinating character if not for anything other than the way internet-based fan communities have united to recuperate him from his reputation as conniving evil-doer.

Sponsored by local public television network Twin Cities Public Television (TPT), the series premiere event was also the launch of TPT’s Rewire, “TPT’s spunky new project that loves the internet (and PBS) as much as you do.” During the screening, attendees were invited to participate in the “second screen” experience of Twitter fandom with the “MustTalkTV” hashtag. Although the TPT/Rewire premiere event was straightforwardly celebratory in one sense (of the aristocracy, of the show’s conservative leanings), the attendee’s enthusiastic dual-participation (both on-site and virtual) complexly registered as earnest, campy and ironic. That TPT/Rewire’s rebranding efforts hinged on the uniquely popular Downton Abbey, a culturally elite British import, speaks to the shifting definitions of “popular” and “elite” in today’s post-network television era.

Before the screening of Downton Abbey, a representative of TPT announced Rewire’s new initiative to host monthly television-centered “book clubs.” The event, “Must Talk TV: A Book Club for Binge Watchers,” promotes itself as akin to a previous event series “Books and Bars,” where attendees presumably gathered to discuss books over a couple of beers. But this new event, Rewire assures us, does not require “all that pesky reading.” On the event website the host prompts potential attendees with a suggestion, “Let’s treat these modern day TV dramas like the high art and literature they’ve aspired to be.”

Along with my dissertation advisor and a handful of my colleagues, I attended the inaugural event of the “Must Talk TV” event series focusing on Downton Abbey – future events will feature House of Cards, The Bletchley Circle, Game of Thrones and Mad Men. The event was moderated by a host, who prompted the room with a series of fast-paced questions that had to do with identifying one’s favorite character, recounting why one started watching the show, or concerned with the details about one’s personal viewing practices. I found that it was a difficult conversation to participate in, mostly because I am ambivalent about my role as a Downton Abbey fan. Sure, I love and appreciate Maggie Smith and her one-liners, have a fondness for Daisy and Mrs. Padmore, cried when they killed off Sybil… but mostly I watch with a certain amount of apprehensive distance. My hope is that by tuning in week to week I might better understand Downton Abbey as a cultural phenomenon.

TPT/Rewire’s “book club” event seems to be an attempt to cultivate a particular kind of fan and/or a particular kind of community around television fandom. The kind of fan or fan community where “binge-watching” is elevated to levels of prestige and participants do not have to bother with “all that pesky reading.” As such, the rebranding of TPT/Rewire reveals much about the way public television is implicated amidst shifting questions of quality, worth, taste, class and legitimacy.

While the series’ documentary aesthetic has often led to the assumption the show itself—as in NBC’s The Office—was the final product of the documentary crew’s filming, and that we have been watching an edited narrative pieced together from larger swaths of footage, the choice to position the diegetic documentary as public television and a successful international export pushes against this assumption in interesting ways.

The end of the trailer for The Office: An American Workplace first glimpsed in “Promos” featured a logo for WVIA. Although I am not familiar enough with public television station names to know for certain this was the local PBS station in Scranton, a quick Google search confirmed my suspicion that it was (and I had a nice chat about it with the station’s official Twitter account). It’s a decision that makes sense given that public television offers the most logical platform for long-form documentary programming within the contemporary television landscape, and a logical parallel with the U.K. series’ own documentary reveal (which didn’t have to reconcile the same broadcast/public television divide given it was public television to begin with).

Their choice of title, in addition to being used in the U.K., also calls back to the origins of reality television, An American Family, which appeared on PBS stations in 1971. What’s interesting about this parallel, however, is that it positions The Office: An American Workplace as a dramatic rather than comic program. An American Family—the making of which was recently dramatized in HBO’s Cinema Vérité—is considered the progenitor of reality television, as what was supposed to be a somewhat mundane glimpse of American life became a story of separation, divorce, and Lance Loud’s groundbreaking “coming out.” And unlike contemporary reality television, wherein we operate with a fairly clear understanding of how reality editing works to refract real events, the Loud Family were caught off guard, publicly pushing back against what they thought was an overly negative portrayal of their lives.

That An American Workplace inspires a similar reaction among The Office’s characters struck me—and others—as ahistorical given the proliferation of reality television and surrounding discourse, but it fits as an extended homage to An American Family and the reaction of its subjects (albeit amped up for comic effect). However, the choice to tie into this documentary tradition also works to de-emphasize the sitcom origins of The Office in favor of a more serious narrative based around the same footage. The show has often pushed its sense of realism into increasingly absurd and ludicrous scenarios, but the trailers for An American Workplace have largely focused on character-driven comedy, working to reground the show in a more realistic setting. An American Workplace allows Greg Daniels and the producers to shape The Office’s legacy, the diegetic documentary functioning as a selective frame through which the characters—and thus the audience—remember the previous nine seasons.

The choice to feature WVIA by name—although the show never calls attention to its public television roots directly, and they missed an opportunity to embed the trailer on WVIA’s website—also works to ground the documentary within the local. Initially, this registered as an implicit acknowledgement that the appeal of a documentary about a paper concern in Scranton, Pennsylvania might not have an inherent appeal outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania and its surrounding area. The series may have lost its focus on the mundane as it sought to keep storylines fresh in later seasons (like Jim and Darryl cavorting with celebrities in their new jobs in Philadelphia), but limiting the reach of their documentary to the immediate surrounding area would have been an effective way of reframing their “celebrity” within the same isolation the series documented early on.

However, “Promos” goes on to reveal multiple trailers translated into different languages, suggesting a successful international sale; in addition, Ed Helms’ Andy spends the episode responding to online comments people are posting on the trailer, suggesting at least some degree of promotion beyond the immediate Scranton area. In both cases, The Office resists giving up its expanding sense of scale, projecting the broad appeal of The Office itself onto the documentary. There’s hubris in the implication that international markets would be interested in a documentary subtitled An American Workplace as opposed to developing their own, similar documentary projects within their own countries (which is what the BBC did with 1974’s The Family based on An American Family), hubris that speaks to the conception of American programming as superior in value within the international market. It also speaks to the universality of The Office, a nod to its network of international viewers and a pat on the back for the ways in which its stories of love and life resonate with viewers across America around the world.

The distinction between The Office and The Office: An American Workplace remains somewhat unclear: are these really separate narratives based on the same material, or rather simply the same narrative promoted differently? It seems difficult to imagine NBC’s The Office airing on public television, but it would also push against this sense of realism if what we’ve been watching were an entirely different product entirely. These diegetic debates aside, however, The Office: An American Workplace has immediately created a space where the meanings of the NBC sitcom can be discursively reframed to best position the show’s legacy as the series prepares to say goodbye.