The Office is a sitcom classic, with NBC currently developing a new iteration of the show as we speak. But there’s no need whatsoever, because someone else has already made a worthy successor. Enter The Dealership. It’s a stunning parody of The Office from the talented staff at New York’s Mohawk Chevrolet.
If I told you a dealership had made their own sitcom, you’d be forgiven for having low expectations. You’d expect a tacky bit that gets old fast, filmed on a phone in a desperate attempt to sell cars. And yet, let me shock you. The Dealership is anything but. I’m going to be bold here. This is the greatest series any dealership has ever made.
The team at Mohawk Chevrolet are actually great on screen, neither over- nor under-acting. It’s all tongue-in-cheek, of course, but the documentary-style camera work and the staff personas are perfect. It genuinely feels like someone started shooting The Office at a dealership.
Episodes are taking off on TikTok, with the later installments racking up millions of views. However, the real fans know that the quality viewing is had over on the dealership’s YouTube channel. There, you can watch the extended-length episodes in glorious 4K.
Just like The Office, the show is all about the characters. We meet Grace in episode one, as she pranks the dealership with endless plastic ducks. From the drop, it’s clear she’s a precious soul, one that just wants to be seen. But she really hits her stride in episode six, as she holds auditions for her big break—a Blazer EV walkaround video. The episode hits its marks perfectly, with these flawed, real characters vying for greatness as they pursue the utterly mundane. That was always a hallmark of The Office, and the same magic shines through here.
@mohawkchevrolet Safe to say the Mohawk Man of The Year award may have gone to Howie’s Head… Here is episode 2 of The Dealership, “From The Ground Up” 🧰 #theoffice
Howie is also sure to be a fan favorite. He’s out there keen to big-note himself in episode two, but he’s more bumbler than boss. At heart, he’s at his bets when he’s simply enjoying watching the garage door go up and down. Other staff at the dealership help to fill out the cast, with techs and office workers adding color to many of the scenes.
They do topical bits, too. Episode seven is titled “Down With The System.” It draws from the current crisis that dealers have been facing with the CDK Global cyberattack shutting down operations.
@mohawkchevrolet Episode 7 of The Dealership, “Down With The System”✍️ #TheDealership #MohawkChevrolet #CarDealership #TheOffice #Skit #Comedy #OfficeParody #Officelife #cdk #automotive @Grace Kerber
A lot of the comedy comes from the cuts. The diary pieces to camera are on point, while also serving as a strong visual link to The Office itself. Meanwhile, interrupting lawnmowers and dealership staff frustrate the best-laid plans of the main characters with impeccable timing.
Speaking to Times Union, the dealership marketing team explained that the magic of the show came from their real-life workdays. After a fellow employee hid little plastic ducks all over the office, the marketing crew realized it would make for an amusing video. In-house video editor Ben Bushen shoots most of the video on a Sony mirrorless camera, mastering the shaky-cam mockumentary-style shots of the original show.
“A lot of it is improvised,” says Bushen. Letting dialogue go unscripted is perhaps part of the magic; it goes a long way to making the performances come across authentically. “Even those interviews are just shoot-off-the-cuff,” he says.
Bushen works on the project with Grace Kerber, a digital branding creator for the dealership. She plays her namesake character, and is behind some of the funniest moments. She branches out into physical comedy in episode five—entitled “Lemme drive the ‘rado.” The popular episode was inspired by a very real situation, where Grace found herself executing a 38-point turn in a crowded dealer lot.
While much of the humor is bite-sized, the team isn’t afraid of stretching its legs when it can. Episode four is a particularly juicy 6-minute episode, as we see Grace take on a secret reconnaissance mission to Mohawk Honda. It’s an obvious nod to the classic “Branch Wars” episode of The Office, while also rooting the characters firmly in the Mohawk world.
Perhaps the reason these videos work so well is that they’re not trying to directly advertise cars or the dealership. It’s not a sales tactic, it’s a quality comedy set in the sometimes banal world of a car dealership. The marketing team tried to make something genuinely fun and creative, and that authenticity rings through to the viewer.
Will the videos help the dealership sell cars anyway? Quite possibly. Speaking to Business Insider, Kerber noted that they’re not trying to convert buyers looking for other brands. “If they want a Chevy, they’re going to buy a Chevy,” she says. Regardless, they’ve seen comments from viewers well outside their local area who are keen to visit Mohawk Chevrolet to see the real-live set of The Dealership. “Part of doing these fun videos is it makes people feel like they know you and are comfortable going there,” Kerber told the outlet. “They love the environment from what they see online, and that’s where they might want to get their next car.”
Ultimately, if you’re looking for a chuckle on your lunch break, fire up the YouTube playlist and binge-watch The Dealership. It’s free, it’s fun, and it’s good. A pat on the back is in order, because the team at Mohawk nailed it.
Image credits: Mohawk Chevrolet via YouTube screenshot
[Ed note: Shoresy is clearly the best show on television, but I’ll grant you that this is already better than season 3 of The Bear. – MH]
Awesome. Just so, so, awesome.
Thank you for this! A crazy rabbit hole to fall into on the 4th. I’ll have a break from watching old dealer training films. Have you seen the one on the 58 Imperial versus Cadillac yet? Or Comet versus Corvair? No you answer??? You don’t know living! The Vega and Citation training films are really funny actually telling sales folks how to sell the newest, leading edge, concepts in transportation.
Although it was a campaign rather than a series, I’m still a huge fan of Trunk Monkey.
I found trunk monkey to be a bit racist. Funny otherwise
Just like The Office, I could stand only about 10 seconds before shutting it down.
“That’s GOLD Jerry. Can I use that?”
Like Seinfeld, the Office is almost too perfect to do a remake unless the original cast is used somehow, some way. Not just cameo appearances.
Ask Jason Alexander how his shows worked out…
Maybe it can be redone well with new folks, but?
Kudus to that Chevy dealership. Very funny.
The US series was a remake of the UK series.
Right. Yet the US series was completely a new thing to us folks.
Can honestly say that most Americans were totally unaware it had come from the UK, until the show had been on a good while here.
And you know we did try to watch a couple episodes of your version, but being ignorant people, and from the south, we really could not understand half of what was being said.We looked at each other and both said, “can you understand them?”
Then we realized that we could not follow the plots because we were trying so hard to understand the accents, that we were very distracted.
So in closing, I bet your version was great.
Question: is it tough for you all to understand our versions of English?
We knew some English folks here very well, and they would say the Southern peoples were the hardest to understand due to the accents.
And Happy 4th of July!
There is supposedly a small enclave in the coastal Carolinas where the English dialect is as close to 17th and 18th century British English as you can find in the US.
Ocracoke Island
That’s it.
The original Office was good, but a different energy than the US remake. I found the UK version much more depressing.
Both are good shows, but many will likely prefer one over the other.
Exactly. The boss says the sense of humor is different UK vs USA. And I agree. Except Monty Python’s first movie (Grail?) was side splitting funny stuff.
Carry on good sir.
I mean, if people have a problem with Monty Python, I’m gonna fight them =)
Right. Remember the Holy Grail premier in LA. It took me a few minutes to really adjust because had never seen anything like that ever before. Was 17. Now 49 yrs later and dozens of viewings later it is better everytime.
Hey that’s not far from here. Pretty interesting and somehow the best advertising involving a GM brand I’ve seen in my entire life. Which admittedly is the lowest bar I can imagine, but hey, good one them.
This is good, they seem to have watched this video from 5 years ago and run with the idea.
I lol’d.
This whole thing…soooooo close. It’s well done and some of the acting is genuinely really freakin’ good. But there’s just enough stilted delivery and slightly not great editing to throw the whole thing off enough to make me sad. So close.
I lol’d again.
ok, I straight up guffawed that time.
This is what happens when you hire a Guy On Tinder to do your ads
A Chevy dealership making a parody?
Mahk! Paging Mahk!
I don’t shake hands.
Right? Did nobody learn ANYTHING in 2020?
God I wish I could get buy-in like this where I work. Most just don’t want to be on camera (understandable), or would just way over-act to ham it up to the camera. We’ve had a few good skits on our TikTok account but it’s always pulling Internet staff away from other duties, and not something we can do regularly.
While The Office isn’t my jam, I have to give huge applause to the team at Mohawk for shooting for it and offer them the sincerest congratulations for getting enough favor from the algorithm to launch, and admire their ability to capture lightning in the bottle and keep at it.
In response to Matt’s claim about Shoresy being the best show on right now, did Roberta Bondar join up or something? Huh?
They have one about the CDK outage and its great.
“hamburger or hot dog?”
Whatever happened to the “King of Cars” guy? For a Dodge dealer, it was pretty fun. Vegas baby!
Chrome wheels and magical genies. Those were simpler times.
This was actually really charming and legitimately funny. The increase in quality from episode to episode is noticeable. If you told me this morning that I would subscribe to a car dealer’s YouTube channel to make sure I don’t miss future episodes of their parody of “The Office” I’d have never believed it, but we live in strange times and we take our laughs where we can, I guess.
Really racking up the views on YouTube…
We’ve actually had one of those same ducks sitting on a cubicle wall for months.
No one cares who put it there. We just like the duck.
Gotta get me a ducking ‘Rado!
This is brilliant. Now I want to go and buy a Chevy Aveo from them.
The Office is not a great Show, but it is a perfect show. I still physically cringe watching some of the stuff, that humor is really uncomfortable for me, but it’s so soothingly anodyne. There is lots of shouting, but that seems to be true of everything except Star Trek TNG.
Parks and Rec is similar, but less uncomfortable in my experience
Parks and Rec is TV comfort food in the best possible sense of the term.
THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS
o.O
These are gems. Thank you for making my day.
Halfway through episode 2. It’s pretty entertaining.
You stopped “halfway” through a 2 1/2 minute video to leave a review?
Different windows. Watching it as I type. Now in 6 because I have nothing better to do.
It’s 2024. I couldn’t even make it through the first video. Who has 2.5 minutes for ONE VIDEO?
This explains why people fight on airplanes now, I suppose.
Some of us fought on airplanes before it became fashionable.
The good old days…
TikTok is over there –> 😛
https://giphy.com/gifs/theoffice-the-office-tv-episode-808-hOgG8s3yowIqEnAx8e
I’ll take a marketing tactic like this over the super misogynistic and creepy Dodge/Jeep/Ram guy on TikTok. Whether or not their sales tactics are actually consumer friendly I have no idea, but something like this is a great way to get people to feel comfortable in a dealer.
Parasocial relationships are a really common thing these days, especially with YouTube and TikTok creators, so I imagine customer satisfaction will spike massively at a minimum. Say what you will about the issues with social media and marketing tactics in the modern era, but this is one of the best, most natural ways I’ve seen it done.