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.

Way of Life, "The Ultimate Habit Building App"

On New Year’s Day, instead of signing up for a gym or joining a writing group, I binge downloaded apps on my iPad. Perhaps it was the grease hangover from a night of eating only chicken wings in a comedy club upstairs from a Chinese restaurant, or perhaps it was the usual grad student anxiety made worse by habitual procrastination to Academic Coach Taylor memes. Whatever the cause of my guilt, my answer was in the App Store. So, I downloaded a bunch of apps: one to count calories, another to create ambient music in order work better, harder, and faster, and another to figure out what mental roadblocks weigh me down, in order to – as the app urges – “live better every day.” To top it off, I bought a habit building app that reminds me to record whether I counted my calories, whether I worked harder, better, and faster, and whether I overcame those mental roadblocks. The app charts my progress over time and shares it with my social networks.

This remedy is one part Lifehacker’s cult of productivity, half part Anthony Robbin’s self-help-ism, and two parts Kevin Kelly’s Quantified Self. And like eating fried chicken in the dark, this remedy instantly gratifies but never quite satisfies. Like other purported technological cure-alls today, this one is identified through a neologism, is criticized as a buzzword, and is hailed by proponents as a movement. “Gamification” is this process of using game logics such as points, badges, levels, challenges, and rewards to enhance traditionally non-game experiences. This experience might be uploading your fitness milestones onto Nike+  and syncing it with your workout on the Xbox 360 Kinect; it may be boosting productivity at a call center by using leaderboards and badges; it may be competing with your roommate for tangible rewards using a sophisticated system of rules to more pleasantly accomplish household chores. It is the carrot and the stick; it is putting more life into your life.

Nike+ Kinect Training

In all these examples, there is a representational structure linking reward to achievement, cause to effect – a structure that gamification enthusiasts claim produces unprecedented behavior change. Gamification allows you to incentivize anything in your (or your employees’) life to make it more fun, more efficient, more effective. In the words of Jane McGonigal – the movement’s high priestess who galvanized a legion of marketers and game designers in that TED talk – games can make a better world and make us “SuperBetter”™ – incidentally, also the name of her latest game.

At MIT’s Futures of Entertainment Conference, a panel of gaming experts playfully refused to respond to a persistent question rising to the top of a crowdsourced backchannel – “What is the future of Gamification?” Dismissed by these experts as a a fancy name for customer loyalty programs that are a perversion of game mechanics, and disdained as “marketing bullshit,” it is easy to write off gamification as the latest marketing buzzword. However, as media scholars have witnessed in half a decade of critical deconstruction of what was known as “Web 2.0,” technological buzzwords are never empty – they are ciphers for configurations of cultural values that iteratively shape relations between people, systems, and institutions.

The gamified website for NBC's The Office

On The Office’s gamified website, users signed up as employees of the fictional Dunder Mifflin paper company and earned “Schrute Bucks” for making comments, posting photos and performing tasks that built engagement and buzz for the show. It didn’t take long for the site to be populated with user-generated content. In an interview with Mashable, the gamification startup Bunchball raved that “NBC loved it because they were paying all these users fake money to do real work.” Unlike the conception of pure waste that game scholars such as Roger Caillois have used to define play, the playfulness of gamification is consummately productive.

According to the Pew center’s survey of experts, gamification may retreat as a fad, but only because its mechanisms will become more entrenched and quotidian – a trajectory that Web 2.0 took in becoming simply “social media.” Therefore, despite the fatigue from yet another marketing revolution, media scholars must map the contours of Gamification’s discourses as they erect and legitimate motivational structures for narrowly predetermined behaviors in our work, leisure, and psychic lives. These are structures that capture our playfulness, our guilt, our desires, our energies, and convert them into quantifiable outcomes such as engagement in platforms, loyalty to brands, user-generated data, and user-generated content. In Blade Runner (1982), the visionary doctor proclaimed that “commerce is our goal here at Tyrell; more human than human is our motto.” And as the film has taught three decades of moviegoers, we have to ask ourselves what it means to be human. Similarly, as we reinvent our lives through gamification, we have to ask ourselves what it means to be alive.

In celebrating this most perverse of television pairs, I want to argue first that it operates as a bracing “shadow couple” for the wholesome Jim and Pam and second that its meanings are deepened by the fact that Dwight and Angela represent versions of culturally normative modes of  masculinity and femininity pushed to pathological extremes. I shall refer to the couple henceforth using the moniker bestowed upon it by series fans – Dwangela.

I want to assert at the outset that The Office is a series whose well-wrought couple relationships have not been sufficiently analyzed.  The web of overt and covert desires that animates the series is complex and multi-dimensional as may be seen in the numerous suggestions of Michael’s fascination with Ryan and the often devastating relationship between Ryan and Kelly.  (When Ryan confesses dejectedly that “For whatever reason, I can’t do better than Kelly,” beside him Kelly beams in complete misunderstanding).  At the same time we would do well to note the series’ preference for couples which is indicated in part by its often shocking handling of single mother Meredith.

In this context, Dwangela emerges as a product of the impossible authoritarianism that characterizes the bizarre world of the contemporary corporate workplace.  Where Pam and Jim (a couple whose sweetness is wonderfully conveyed by the fused appellation “Jam”) are associated with mild and often toothless critiques of the corporate regime, pulling pranks and expressing symbolic (and frequently non-verbal) opposition to or incredulity about the absurdities of corporate life, Dwangela perform a more substantive critical function.

Dwight Schrute’s signature characteristic is a reverence for all forms of order and authority.  His conceptual templates for individual and institutional behavior are adopted from the brutalities of nature and the animal kingdom.  (He avoids smiling, we are told, because “showing one’s teeth is a submission signal in primates”).  Dwight’s understanding reflects a comically exaggerated form of the ubiquitous corporate parables that use animal metaphors to promulgate fantasies of self-empowerment in an era of consolidating corporate control.  Business mantras that exhort workers to “run with the wolves,” pursue re-located and deferred rewards conceptualized as the cheese for worker mice or typologize themselves and their co- workers as residents in an “organizational zoo” have proliferated in the neoliberal workplace.  Dwight is the company man turned inside out, his continually thwarted sense of grandiosity is matched by a sometimes touching credulousness (he believes in androids, bats that turn humans into vampires and the powers of Amazon women).

If Dwight is a distorted version of the aggressive and diligent capitalist male, Angela is a hyperbolic version of the “good girl,” seemingly adherent to old-fashioned behavioral norms and regularly seeking to act as a moral watchdog over her office colleagues.  Intensely attracted to power (as Dwight himself astutely observes) she, like Dwight, identifies intensely with animals and indeed she appears to  have more of an affinity with animals than with humans (the precipitating cause of the Dwangela breakup in Season Four is Dwight’s decision to euthanize Angela’s cat Sprinkles).  The extent of Angela’s identification with the feline is made clear when she describes a Halloween picture of herself in cat costume holding Sprinkles as “just a couple of kittens.”

Tall, deep-voiced and yet sartorially “off,” Dwight represents an idealized masculinity that isn’t quite right.  Similarly the diminutive and blonde Angela (so tiny she sometimes buys her clothing at the American Girl store) pushes idealized femininity to an uncomfortable extreme. Despite their shared affinity for order and control (each repeatedly praises the other to co-workers as “efficient”) Dwangela’s propensity for troubling the workplace keeps bursting forth partly in episodes of office sex, secret rendez-vous and (mostly) private modes of communication.  They actively personalize the workplace and appropriate it for their own interests.  Dwight secretly stocks an arsenal at Dunder Mifflin while Angela brings her cat to work where it sleeps in a file cabinet.  The resulting impression undercuts authority with anarchy, the human with the animal and the surface appearance of productivity and order with a complex libidinal economy.  I suggest that the Dwangela couple is fundamentally organized around an awareness that the kind of contemporary workplace it is so devoted to has lost its humanity.

What are some of your favorite TV holiday episodes? They can be episodes that aired last week or in 1952–it doesn’t matter! Weigh in with your favorites in the comments. To get you started, here are four of my personal picks!

Seinfeld–“The Strike” (1997) This holiday episode brought us Festivus, a holiday that the Seinfeld canon tells us was developed by George’s father, Frank Costanza, in response to the commercialization of Christmas and Hanukkah. The holiday was actually developed in 1965 by writer Dan O’Keefe, but most of us only know Festivus and its aluminum pole (replacing the traditional tree) from the Seinfeld crew. It’s a Festivus for the rest of us!

Felicity–“Finally” (1998) In this first season episode, Felicity and Noel attempt to put off defining their new romance in order to study for finals. (Of course, they can’t possibly study because they’re too busy making out.) What makes the episode so great is the efforts to cut together related but individual storylines involving the entire ensemble, mirroring the hectic experience of studying for college finals. The highlight of this episode, though, is when Noel takes some of the “Smart Powder” being distributed by Felicity’s roommate Meghan and has an allergic reaction. His crazed misunderstanding of Felicity’s interaction with Ben makes for some festive hilarity, and makes this a memorable holiday classic.

The OC–“Best Chrismukkah Ever” (2003) The OC became relatively well-known for its annual Chrismukkah episodes, and the series even launched its own holiday-themed album (one I highly recommend). Of the series’ four holiday eps, though, the first was the best. Ryan’s very own Cohen-family Chrismukkah stocking! Anna & Summer fighting over Seth! Marissa getting drunk (again)! Jesus & Moses working together to perform a Chrismukkah miracle! What more could you want?

The Office–“A Benihana Christmas” (2006) The Office has had a few memorable and entertaining holiday episodes, but my favorite is an hour-long episode in which Michael is dumped by his girlfriend, Carol. To cheer him up, the guys take him to Benihana, where the boss drinks too much and ends up bringing two waitresses back to the office Christmas party. Hijinks ensue, as they do at Dunder-Mifflin, and the highlight, in my opinion, is the moment Michael marks one of the waitresses with a marker because he can’t remember which of the two potential paramours is “his” and which is Andy’s.

There are certainly lots of others–many classic TV episodes I’ve left off the list, and I haven’t chosen any mid-season cliffhangers–but these four are among my favorites. So now it’s your turn–what are some of yours?

Psst! Need some inspiration before chiming in? Check out this awesome listing of full holiday eps available online!