Ellington

Every Tuesday and Thursday, Zeina Hamed goes to her COM 495 class.

But instead of traditional lectures and coursework, the class — titled The Office: 2.0 — talks about life lessons and themes from hit television shows.

The Office: 2.0 is designed to teach students how to create and market a TV show based on the themes and real-life situations of NBC’s hit mockumentary starring Steve Carell and Rainn Wilson.

“I was so excited to take it, because it sounded completely different,” Hamed said. “The subject matter seemed so interesting.”

The class is being offered this quarter by the communication department and is focused on the idea of television as a strong cultural force and the necessary development steps in creating a hit show.

Joanne Harrell, a member of the UW Board of Regents who is on the council of student affairs and academic learning, first came up with the idea for the class when she was on bedrest nursing a knee injury.

“I watched TV a lot, and I realized there was a gap in the programming relative to developing tools and shows to help people succeed,” Harrell said. “How can we help people be more successful in the work environment? There wasn’t anything targeting that specifically, so I reached out to the school of communications.”

The class was developed around the idea of how to develop television programming while incorporating useful tools in a real-life setting. To ground it into this type of setting with a television show focused on work, The Office was used to make the topic relevant and accessible to students.

“Television — the creativity, the storytelling, the force that is TV — sometimes is forgotten or gets lost,” said Florangela Davila, who teaches the class. “I think a class that looks at the power of TV, the historical significance, the relevance, the power to address stereotypes or breaks stereotypes, is rich and something that makes students inherently curious and engaged. The value of a class like this is really about how to execute an idea, and that is applicable to the real world. … How to launch an idea, work in a team, and face real life challenges are good qualities for students to start thinking about.”

Television has been found to be a useful medium in offering lessons that can apply to real-life settings, and this is not the first time television has been a central aspect of college courses.

Georgetown University offers Philosophy and Star Trek. Rochester Institute of Technology has an Introduction to Cultural Studies: The Simpsons in its literature department. Oberlin College provides a course on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

On the UW campus, the management department offers a special-topics course on The Apprentice, under MGMT 490. Using episodes from the show as cases, the class is designed to help students’ expertise in managerial environments.

“We can all relate to [television]. They are fictional characters with real-world attributes,” Davila said. “They raise serious issues like diversity, relationships, and promotions, and things that are reflective of occurrences that might happen in the real world of business.”

The final project of the class will be to develop and market a unique show based on accessible, real-life situations. Themes from The Office and other similar work-setting television programs will be used as inspiration for the creation of the new show.

With the current economic situation, work-setting television programs are particularly relevant and on the rise.

“The notions of work, especially with unemployment being so high, the recession, economic issues, job issues are things that are at the forefront of peoples minds,” Davila said. “It’s an area of opportunity to look at and see if there’s territory to explore and how to do it.”

The class’s main goal is to teach students how to execute and launch an idea in a real-world environment with a unique setting.

“Television isn’t just about entertaining; it’s informative,” Davila said.

That’s what she said.

Reach contributing writer Katie Burke at development@dailyuw.com.