Abbott Elementary is a disorienting watch.

Описание: I wrote this a few months ago and procrastinated until the Always Sunny crossover. This episode made continual, central reference to camera footage, but didn't concentrate strongly on its practicality. Always Sunny has toyed with this stuff in concept episodes but has a cartoony world, so the breaches of reality in their mockumentaries don't feel they're shattering something.

errata near the end: yeah, The Office US has a plot toward the end about a camera operator. I consider this plot point to have been added for the sake of foreshadowing the finale reveal, by reminding the audience and the show-world that it's allegedly a documentary.

two weeks later: I've just started on What We Do In The Shadows and that breaks things the same way, frequently referring to camera crew and constantly doing things that couldn't happen with camera. It feels a bit more allowable because it's less realistic: suspension of disbelief starts out with the documentary crew following multimurderer vampires and it involves all the hacky tropes of vampire lore, so the show doesn't really ask us to consistently believe it's something in our world being filmed for TV. Their camera crew references feel more audacious, half the time toying with the very fact they're breaking the rules like this.