I couldn't agree more....The American Office is back on American TV. And all the Americans I know are rabbiting on about how it's the greatest show on TV ever.
It clearly isn't. Not when Star Stories is on BBC America. But you can see why they're excited. The Office deals with race and alienation and the sheer banality of everyday life in a way that is truly revolutionary for the American sitcom. And this excites a certain part of America greatly.
This year saw the second Office convention in Scranton - the boring town in northeast Pennsylvania that stands in for the Brit original's Slough (even though it's actually shot in California.)
Scranton has also become the new Peoria - the legendary political litmus test for the US presidential election. It came to prominence during the primaries as Hilary Clinton's (sorta) hometown. Turns out that Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden is also (kinda) from Scranton.
And so - with grim inevitability - "hard scrabble" Scranton changed from a boring shithole that nobody cared about, into a marvelous microcosm of authentic, blue collar, domestic beer drinking, "hard working" America; and was namechecked by Democrats and Republicans alike as exactly the sort of economically-depressed, white, working class dump Obama has to win to have any chance of becoming president.
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