The Thing That Made The Office Great Is the Same Thing That Killed It

Its TV-as-catharsis approach to the monotony of office work was groundbreaking, but the show’s premise wasn’t built to last more than a few seasons.

There isn’t a more quintessentially American form of relaxation than resting your feet on a coffee table after a long day at work and turning on the tube. After all, what better way to take your mind off of the job you left just a few hours earlier than by watching a TV show?

Unless, of course, that TV show is The Office. NBC’s mockumentary sitcom, which concludes its ninth and final season on Thursday, flipped the TV-as-a-distraction-from-real-life paradigm by setting the action in precisely the type of workplace many people long to escape. The gambit worked brilliantly, and proved that a weekly television show could be the perfect medium to tell stories about contemporary work culture—for a while.