What is the secret to a great mockumentary?

Could you find a more likable attitude? A happier, happier-to-know-you kind of attitude

Over the past 20 years, the mockumentary format has become synonymous with the sitcom

From The Office, to Parks and Rec, to Modern Family, to Abbott Elementary

some of the most popular sitcoms have been mockumentaries. But why? What do I know

What is it about this genre that attracts people like camera crews to paper companies

Boom! Freeze! Michael Schoon, FBI, you know what you did! Y'all must have forgot I'm me

My wife and I have a timeshare. In Muncie? These cards are 11

This is how it hits. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a mockumentary is defined as a..

Whoops, hit a paywall. Take that tropey dictionary definition intro. So according to Merriam-Webster's free dictionary, a mockumentary is defined as a facetious or

satirical work, such as a film, presented in the style of a documentary

Almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie. One of the first mainstream mockumentaries is F for fake, where filmmaker Orson Welles

documents the career of Elmer de Ori a professional art forger who is a real person So it was a fake documentary about a real person forcing the audience to consider for themselves what is truth and what is a lie

and whether it actually matters. Is every mockumentary this meta? No. But the good ones tow that line between art imitating life

and life imitating art. Arguably, the genre went fully mainstream with 1984's This is Spinal Tap

a fake documentary about Britain's loudest band. There's a fine line between stupid and clever

The band was fake, but the music sounded like it was from a real band

So initially, audiences were a little confused. People didn't get it right away

They didn't know what the hell it was. People come up and they said, why would you make a movie about a band that nobody ever heard of

But once people got the joke, the film became a cult classic

It evolved into something. We did a tour in 92, 93 that was now a completely legitimate tour with huge amounts of people watching

And now that the separation had been totally erased between what we had created for the film and reality

And we played Wembley. There were 73,000 people there. The fake band parodying real bands had become a real one

Christopher Guest then went on to make a slew of wildly successful mockumentaries such as Waiting for Guffman This is the day of the show Oh my God And Best in Show How much weight do you think I could bench press

Just make a guess, ballpark figure. By the mid-2000s, people were now in on the mockumentary joke

and it started to spill over into mainstream TV with The Office

I declare bankruptcy! Hat tipped the OG UK office, my favorite, but it was the American office that made it the international hit it is today

It inspired such subsequent hits as Parks and Rec, Modern Family, Abbott Elementary, and so many more

There are too many to mention. What is it about mockumentaries that's so alluring

First, it's that voyeuristic excitement that we are watching someone deal with something vulnerable in real time

That was the most embarrassing moment of my life. Christopher Guest, considered by many to be the mockumentary goat or bloodhound

I'm the best one here. I'm the best one you ever seen

Talks about the allure of the mockumentary being the perceived spontaneity of it

There's a spontaneity that comes from this kind of work that you don't find in a conventional

movie because the things being said are being said for the first time. And it's a different

way of working. I find it exciting and I think other actors find it exciting because you're

there in the moment when you work on a conventional film and you worked on you rehearsed you know what the next line is going to be You are acting in a different way This is more reacting to something that happening legitimately for the first time

There's no dialogue written at all. In any film you've made? No. The sitcoms we've come to know and love within the same format are almost entirely scripted

We had great scripts and great writers. We always made sure that we got every line as scripted

People like seeing things that are authentic, or at least feel like they are really happening

Yet they feel safe knowing that it's not actually happening. The feeling of reality with enough separation to know it's entertainment

That little pocket of safety within a seemingly real moment is the mark of a great mockumentary

Nailed it. With the rise of the internet and social media, coupled with access to more news and world events becoming so real and overwhelming that we wish it were fiction

mockumentaries have become more popular and more prevalent on our screens because they toe that

perfect middle ground between truth and fiction assuming that difference actually matters the

important distinction to make is not so much whether it's a real painting or a fake it's

whether it's a good fake or a bad fake what's your favorite mockumentary let us know in the

comments. Otherwise, we'll catch you next time on How It Hits