A recent episode of “The Office” began with the appearance of a mother holding a baby. “Oh, she’s absolutely adorable!” coos the receptionist, Pamela Beesly (Jenna Fischer), before being informed that the cute little creature is actually male. Blushing, Pamela tries to explain away her faux pas by noting that the baby is dressed in pink. “That’s his favorite color,” the mother retorts, a trifle haughtily — or is it defensively? Thirty seconds into the episode, we are already in the weird, radically destabilized, seesaw world of a certain kind of contemporary sitcom. Is the baby gay? Can you tell that early? Or is something wrong with the mother?

No matter. What concerns us here is not the baby but the boss, Michael Scott (Steve Carell), the putative authority figure in this fictional office, who walks into the room and catches sight of the tiny tot. “Oh, wow, look at that, how cute!” he says. For a moment, despite his repellent smile and Nixonian nose, Michael looks like what he’s supposed to be — the branch manager of a paper manufacturing company, a well-dressed adult sufficiently skilled socially to know how to compliment a mother on her newborn. And the mother is delighted. “Thank you!” she says. “May I?” Michael asks, starting to duck down toward the baby, as if to kiss it. “Sure” the mother replies, only Michael keeps ducking down, right past the mother and baby, onto the floor, where he crawls under a desk and assumes a fetal position.

“Hey, look at me!” he calls out. “I’m a baby! I’m one of those babies from ‘Look Who’s Talking.’ What am I thinking? Look at all those staplers. What’s a stapler? I don’t even know, I’m a baby! Hey, Mom, I’m thirsty. I’m thirsty, Momma, I want some milk. You know where milk comes from? Breasts.”

Meet the new boss, crazier than the old boss. It’s an extraordinary scene, one that just a few years ago would have appeared only in avant-garde theater or the wildest kind of farce. Here it’s played deadpan, in a show suffused with a crushing sense of dull, quotidian existence under fluorescent lighting: An executive is introduced to a baby, and his reaction is to get on the floor and pretend to be a baby himself. The level of narcissism enacted in the scene, complete with the obligatory pop culture reference, is stunning. Yet, on some level, we’re supposed to find Michael lovable.

And, apparently, normal. The new TBS sitcom about a struggling Midwestern supermarket, “10 Items or Less,” which made its premiere on November 27, is more or less modeled on “The Office.” (“If you think an office is funny,” says the voice on a TBS promo,”wait till you see what goes on in the supermarket.”) The boss here is Leslie Poole (John Lehr), who knows nothing about the food business but inherits the supermarket, along with its goofy staff, when his father, who owned and managed the Greens & Grains store for decades, unexpectedly dies of a heart attack.

The father, we quickly learn, was a sensible manager, an American of the old school. (He’s shown in a lab coat and owlish glasses.) His son might as well belong to a different species. Like Michael on “The Office,” he can’t stop performing; inheriting the store doesn’t mean responsibility, or being a leader. It means playing the lead — stardom. Even his father’s death — he keeled over in the supermarket, knocking down a display stand — is a sort of joke to him, as if he’d seen it on a sitcom.

“The funny thing,” he tells someone in the opening episode, grinning maniacally, “was Carl the stock boy was the first on the scene. He went to the display first, before he went to my father. Because his training was, Display down! Display down!”

“That’s very sad.”

“It is, it is.”

“10 Items or Less” is a blue-collar sibling to “The Office,” and it’s cleverly written and funny. As with “The Office,” it sets the bar high in terms of making it possible to see the lead character as being anything more than a jerk. Like Michael, Leslie doesn’t have any feelings, but he’s seen plenty of people on TV who do. As for the people who work for him, part of their jobs is to try to instill a sense of reality in the man who governs much of theirs by teaching him that life doesn’t always correspond to TV. The writers imply that pop and corporate culture have turned us into a nation of children, and the biggest child of all is the one who makes it to the top of the ladder.

One new boss on the block who does seem grown up is Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) of “30 Rock,” who is all suave Fifth Avenue sophistication, as befits a vice president of East Coast television programming. Donaghy (it seems right to use his surname) is the upper-class boss, the elite Satan-tempter with the whispery seductive manner whose narcissism is hidden by a ruthless adherence to a statistical measure of reality. Trying to persuade someone to wear a wig, he says, “Pete, did you know that men with full heads of hair on average earn 17% more than their bald counterparts?”This is the kind of thing Donaghy knows, and it’s his way of pretending to take an interest in people, and what’s frightening about it is that one has no doubt that what he says is absolutely true.

But Donaghy is also a buffoon. He is, for example, incapable of writing an after-dinner speech for himself — even one in honor of his idol, Jack Welch. He tries out an opening line on a comedy writer, Liz Lemon (Tina Fey), who works under him: “Jack Welch has such unparalleled management skills that they named Welch’s Grape Juice after him, because he squeezes the sweetest juice out of his workers’ mind-grapes.”

Donaghy is the boss whom the bosses of “The Office” and “10 Items or Less” would like to be. He oversees the world of entertainment and celebrity from which they derive their image of the world. He makes his money from television, but he doesn’t act like he’s on television — he doesn’t need to. That may be why we can laugh wholeheartedly at “30 Rock,” whereas, watching “The Office” or “10 Items,” if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.