It’s difficult to overstate how much I like the mockumentary format. It’s a greatly underrated format that in recent years has been unfortunately boxed into sitcom comedies. There’s nothing wrong with that; personally, I’m a huge fan of The Office and Modern Family and I think they work great as sitcoms.
But I think these shows don’t truly exemplify the mockumentary format best. In Modern Family especially, the documentary crew is basically decorative. There’s no reason given as to why they are being filmed, and the audience is expected to suspend disbelief whenever a talking head scene occurs.
The Office handles this a bit better, with an in-universe documentary crew. However, the existence of the documentary crew contributes nothing to the plot, and it’s unclear why a documentary crew is following Dunder Mifflin and why characters open up so much to the crew. When the crew is actually brought into the plot in later seasons, it ends up feeling awkward (we’ve been primed to treat the crew as an invisible watcher) and leads to one of the worst plotlines in the show.
Compare this with the format of American Vandal, where the documentary team is diagetic to an extent that isn’t seen in many other mockumentaries. Modern Family and The Office borrow the documentary format as a means to surface comedic reactions, whereas American Vandal tells a story that can only exist as a mockumentary. This format allows American Vandal to build melodrama and satirize high school life and true crime media in a way that a conventional narrative can’t. It has a built-in sense of authenticity and allows the writers to naturally incorporate stuff like crime-scene 3d visualizations into the show.
Something I wish more mockumentaries would do is commit to the internal logic of a mockumentary. The crew doesn’t necessary have to be driving the narrative, but the existence of the documentary crew shouldn’t require suspension of disbelief.
The Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them movie, for instance, could have been adopted as a David Attenborough-style documentary (or the wizarding equivalent) of said fantastical beasts instead of the bloated, nonsensical adventure it became (admittedly that would probably fail from a financial perspective). Star Wars could bring one of my favorite SNL skits, Star Wars Undercover Boss, and make it into a reality by formatting something like that as an empire propaganda film or something like that.
Anyways, I mostly wrote this because the cancellation of American Vandal which still grinds my gears. Genuinely blows my mind that it got cancelled that early.