The critically acclaimed, popularly viewed NBC television comedy series, The Office, has become a phenomenon of media, due to its monumental outbreak in the television industry from 2005 to 2013. The Office portrays the lives of Michael Scott, regional manager of Dunder Mifflin Paper Company in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and his employees through a documentary film crew that follows the cast around 24/7, capturing their everyday lives at and outside of work, as well as the ridiculously humorous antics they become involved in. The show’s distinct evolution of characters, plots, and relationships serve as the cultural foreground of the series. Each specifically placed character and relationship has its own distinct meaning, meant to represent a certain ideology for the audience to unearth and adapt. …show more content…
Specifically, The Office follows hegemonic media trends and gender archetypes like much of mainstream media does. The women in the show are portrayed in a multitude of stereotypical characterizations such as being inferior, weak, sexually promiscuous, crazy, bitchy, unintelligent, or as meager objects for male indulgence. What this paper aims to achieve is an understanding of how The Office reinforces archetypal hegemonic gender portrayals of its female characters. By conducting a detailed character analysis of this mainstream media text, it can be determined how gender ideologies associated with women are represented in the series. The presentation of such ideologies will allow for an explanation of how those ideologies are, in fact, supporting the archetypes of women that media feeds to its