The enduring appeal of The Office in a crumbling world
When The Office reached the end of its six-episode first season on NBC in 2005, nobody thought there would be more.
The ratings were atrocious. Of the 156 shows on broadcast networks that TV season, The Office landed at 102 in total viewership. Despite a surprisingly large audience for its premiere — 11.2 million people — 57 percent had lost interest by the finale.
Michael Schur, a writer on that first season who would go on to create some very successful TV shows of his own, summed up the mood of impending doom well when I interviewed him for a 2018 podcast.
“There was a moment when we were shooting the last episode, where the cast was sort of huddled outside, and everyone was a little bit glum because it was our last week of shooting. Even though the show wouldn’t air for months, everyone kind of felt like, there’s no way this ever works,” he recalled.
You probably know what happened next. NBC unexpectedly renewed The Office, banking on the track record of creator Greg Daniels (of The Simpsons and King of the Hill fame) and on Steve Carell breaking out as a genuine movie star in the then-upcoming The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Both bets paid off. In its second season, The Office became a bona fide cult and critical hit, capping off its unlikely turnaround that year by winning the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series. By its sixth season, it was just a hit, period, the 11th-biggest show on TV among younger viewers.
Somehow, The Office has only grown in stature since it left the air in 2013, bolstered by Netflix, where the extremely limited data there is suggests that it’s a massive smash. Twitter imploded when NBCUniversal announced it would be pulling The Office from the service in 2021. (It is, as of July 15, also available on the NBCUniversal streaming service Peacock, which will become the show’s exclusive home once it leaves Netflix.)
There are Office crafts on Etsy. There’s Office merch on Amazon and in Hot Topic. Pop star Billie Eilish — a teenager! — samples the show in a song on her Grammy-winning 2019 album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? In the midst of the global quarantine due to Covid-19, the show’s stars reunited not once but twice for goofy YouTube talk shows hosted by John Krasinski, who played Jim. The show also lives on as part of the internet’s lingua franca, as anybody who’s ever had to say “NOOOOOOOOO” in GIF form can tell you.
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But why? Most shows that become this big in reruns have at least a hint of escapism to them — think Friends (with its candy-colored New York City full of attractive, presumably rich, white people) or The Simpsons (set in an animated world). The Office is a little gray and drab, a little like being devoured whole by a week of Mondays. It takes place in a world where you wear a tie to work, drive every day to a dull office park, where the closest thing to excitement is playing a prank on a coworker. The series features a kind of social realism largely missing from more current notions about the importance of “meaningful” work.
“Young people are being told, ‘You can’t just get a job, you have to find a job that fulfills you, that you’re passionate about,’” said Amy Wharton, a professor emeritus of sociology who taught at Washington State University and published extensively on American work life. “There’s a lot of pressure on people to invest in themselves and work at something that expresses their values, but it’s really hard to find that.”
This contrast makes The Office feel like it takes place in a weirdly bygone era, where our lives are not our jobs and our jobs are not our passion. The series even takes place in Scranton, Pennsylvania, a small city in the middle of the country, exactly the sort of place hollowed out by recession and corporate restructuring in the 21st century.
For these reasons and more, The Office is hardly the show you’d expect to win over the masses. (Really, the only similarly dour comedy to see such massive success in its afterlife is Cheers, and that at least took place where everybody knows your name.) But what’s remarkable about The Office is not only that it’s so beloved, but that it seems to be popular with just about everyone. Teens who will most likely never work at a paper company love it. Their parents, who might be worried about their jobs amid the economic collapse, love it. And lots and lots of people use it to soothe anxieties both current and eternal.
Understanding the rise and enduring appeal of The Office comes down to one age-old TV truism. Every good show is about relationships — between the characters, sure, but also between the show and its fans. Vox talked to a handful of those fans, including a 12-year-old superfan and some of the people who made the show what it was, to find out why this unexpected hit still shines bright in 2020.
The stars: Jenna Fischer (Pam!) and Angela Kinsey (Angela!) on a loving set and a lasting friendship
The night when Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey formed what would become a lasting friendship came in the first season of The Office, during the production of those six episodes that all involved thought would be the only episodes the show ever made. Fischer, who played receptionist Pam Beesly, and Kinsey, who played the prudish and cat-loving accountant Angela Martin, were on a walk back from the warehouse set to the show’s main location (where everyone was parked) when the two got a little goofy, imitating the beginning of Laverne & Shirley — the locked arms, the “schlemiel, schlimazel,” all of it — belting out the theme song into the California night. But they had a spectator.
“Steve Carell had been quietly walking behind us, and we turned around and saw him and we started laughing, real embarrassed,” Kinsey says. “And he looked at us and smiled and said, ‘You know, no matter what happens with this show, this is what you two will take from it, the friendship.’ I think about that all the time. The Office was a gift to us because the relationships and the people, that’s what we took with us.”
Fischer and Kinsey’s friendship did, indeed, last, to the degree that they began a podcast in late 2019 called Office Ladies, in which they go episode by episode and recall their memories from all nine seasons. Both were among the handful of cast members who worked on the show from day one to the finale.
In many cases, actors so closely associated with roles like these are reluctant to talk about those famous roles. They want to move past them. That’s not the case with Fischer and Kinsey, who both continue to work regularly (Fischer was on the two-season ABC show Splitting Up Together and Kinsey in the 2019 Netflix film Tall Girl) but also seem more than happy to discuss the nine years they spent on a wildly popular sitcom.
“My dream when I moved to Los Angeles as an aspiring actor was to be on a long-running comedy television show,” Fischer says. “And so if what happens to me for the rest of my life is that people think of me as Pam, well, that’s a small price to pay for my wildest dream coming true.”
Both have had fans come up to them to say that the show has gotten them through hard times — chemotherapy and the death of loved ones and on and on. Fischer and Kinsey have a theory on why the series strikes such a chord with those who just need comfort food TV: It’s a comfortable kind of TV home.
“You always know where front reception is. You always know where Pam’s going to be. You always know where Dwight is. You always know where accounting is. There is a familiarity with the actual layout of the office,” Kinsey says. “We don’t travel outside of that space very often. It’s just really familiar-feeling. You turn it on, and you instantly know where you’re at.”
But what’s been most surprising to the two is how the series has caught on with an audience they couldn’t have expected: tweens and teens.
“I was touring middle schools for my children, and I was asked to stop going in the classroom by the teachers giving the tour because it was disrupting the classroom too much,” Kinsey says. A teacher told her that The Office is huge with middle schoolers, which prompted Kinsey to wonder why, since, after all, middle schoolers have never worked in an office. The teacher said, “‘Think about it. Every homeroom has a Dwight. Every classroom has an Angela.’ The dynamics that make up the characters of The Office, they work at hospitals. They’re on the PTA. They are your kid’s soccer team parents. They’re in a homeroom. It’s the relationships. It’s not the setting.”
The 12-year-old: How a Gen Z middle schooler discovered her favorite TV show years after it went off the air
When I talked to her in summer 2019, Sidney, who has since turned 13, was 12 years old. She lives in the Los Angeles area. She’s in middle school. And she and her friends all love The Office.
One of those friends even held an Office-themed birthday party. What on earth would an Office-themed birthday party look like? Well, Sidney said when I interviewed her, there were cardboard cutouts of various characters placed around the room, and the event’s theme extended even beyond the event itself.
“The little goody bags on the way out, they were these little Shrinky Dinks of the characters,” Sidney tells me. “Yeah, that was pretty funny.”
It’s mystifying how a show ostensibly aimed at adults that began 15 years ago could appeal to someone like Sidney, who has never held an office job (obviously) and who wasn’t even born when the show began. (She began watching it on Netflix in 2018, five years after it had gone off the air.)
But others who are paying attention to this renewed Office fandom agree on this particular point. In every single conversation I had for this story, I heard the same thing: Tweens and teens love this show.
The executive: How Ben Silverman brought The Office to America, when everybody told him he maybe shouldn’t
Ben Silverman knew The Office was breaking through when he got on a flight early in the show’s run, at some point after NBC made a deal to put episodes on seatback TVs in the series’ third season.
“I remember walking through the plane, hearing laughter, and I knew before I looked into the seatbacks that the people were all watching The Office. And when you get a plane full of people laughing, you’ve got something special,” Silverman said.
Silverman’s role in The Office’s legacy isn’t as immediately memorable as, say, that of creator Greg Daniels, who adapted the original British series (created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant) for American TV, or star Steve Carell. But he is the executive who saw the potential for an American remake of that British show and purchased the rights to it at a time when, he claims, many other TV executives thought bringing the series to the US was foolhardy.
Reveille, Silverman’s company at the time he bought The Office’s American rights, was known for importing shows from other shores and finding ways to make them work for American audiences. (Other Reveille hits included 2004’s The Biggest Loser and 2006’s Ugly Betty.) Silverman’s comfort with finding ways to make a show that worked in one country work in another — or at least finding the right people to translate it — meant he was sure an American Office could work.
“I thought it was hysterical and really saw an opportunity to make a show for America informed by its style and look and also something that could really be a modern version of the old Norman Lear comedies, complete with the Archie Bunker-like boss at the middle. I was excited about it from the beginning,” Silverman said. “Everybody I talked to about it in America was not as interested.”
Thus began his very slow attempt to mount an American remake of the show. First, he hired Daniels, and then the two found a way to convince NBC to let them cast Carell, even though Carell was involved with a different (flailing) NBC series called Come to Papa at the time. (Come to Papa was canceled. Thank goodness, because it’s hard to imagine The Office without Carell.)
A remake of a deadpan British show, The Office at first struggled to find its footing, and now has found enduring popularity long after the show ended. One of its secrets: camerawork inspired by reality television.
Daniels excelled at translating the work of writers with very specific points of view into the mainstream of American television. He’d already done it with the 1997 series King of the Hill, which softened Beavis and Butt-head creator Mike Judge’s MTV-ready voice just enough to make it palatable to a major network (in that case Fox). And Carell was the sort of actor who could flip from monstrous to sympathetic on a dime, a quality Daniels and his writers would mine again and again to flesh out Michael Scott in the years ahead.
But Silverman points to another element of The Office that I, at least, had never once thought about when it came to the show’s success: its look. Silverman points out that if you look at the British original next to the American series, the latter is ever so slightly more influenced by reality television, a format that is more immediately recognizable to us than the sorts of workplace documentaries the original series was emulating.
The American Office pulls back from its characters more in its talking heads. They are less uncomfortably close to the camera and shot more in what’s called a head-and-shoulders — which lets you see roughly the upper half of the body — looking right at the camera. This choice makes these talking-head segments feel more like something from Survivor’s confessionals than from a workplace documentary. In contrast, the British series takes a much more documentary-like approach. It cuts in closer, often at odd angles. The characters look offscreen and don’t always talk to the camera. These shifts between the two series made a huge difference.
Silverman credits much of that style to pilot director Ken Kwapis and director of photography Randall Einhorn, who came over from the world of reality television to help establish the look of the show. The choice was strategic and something the entire team leaned into even more after test scores for the series’ pilot were abysmal.
The show’s ride from barely eking out a renewal for season two (something Silverman pushed particularly hard for behind the scenes) to slowly and steadily building the momentum that made it a hit (helped, certainly, by Silverman becoming president of NBC in the show’s third season) has been oft told elsewhere, but even in its broad strokes, as told by Silverman, the show’s fortunes are a reminder just how much of television is built around making the right decisions and then hoping luck smiles upon you.
