GM'S EWANICK MULLS TURNING CHEVY AD CAMPAIGN INTO SITCOM

By Jeff Sabatini, Autoblog.com - If you haven't noticed, NBC's The Office has really jumped the shark since Steve Carrell left the show at the end of last season. Or maybe the beginning of the end was Pam and Jim's wedding during the sixth season. Regardless, the point is that the show is no longer very funny or edgy, nor does it ever make the audience uncomfortable in the way the brilliant original BBC version did. Rather, as the main characters in the American version of the show have become carictures. The Office has grown predictable and formulaic.

And this is why Chevrolet can launch an ad campaign like its "Under The Blue Arch" series. Despite the brief, 30-second running times of the ads, the characters are instantly recognizable and the "plots" are easy to follow. Although the scenes set in a Chevy dealership play with the tropes created by the Emmy Award-winning series, they do so to little comic effect. Because comedy isn't the point -- these are ads, after all, full of ham-handed product information and designed to sell cars.

If anyone should understand that it is Joel Ewanick, General Motors' Chief Marketing Officer. Yet he told Automotive News at the New York Auto Show that GM has 'talked about turning this into an actual show because we've got so much material."

Well, that Chevy product line isn't nearly the joke it once was, but if you say so.

Let's just chalk this one up to Ewanick being a bit starstruck. "Under The Blue Arch" was created by Randall Einhorm, one of the directors of The Office, and it 'starts' Wayne Wilderson, who appeared on the NBC Show in 2006.