Even at the peak of its popularity around seasons four and five, The Office never generated ratings even comparable to sitcoms like Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory, procedural dramas like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and NCIS, or, especially, reality competition shows like American Idol and Dancing with the Stars. But bars all over America in 2019 don’t host Dancing with the Stars or NCIS trivia nights. The Big Bang Theory isn’t breaking streaming records on Netflix and teens aren’t bingeing Two and a Half Men on their phones. It’s The Office that has emerged as the most beloved sitcom of the 2000s and just gets bigger with each passing year.
John Krasinski: I was home visiting my parents recently and they said there was a girl up the street who was about fifteen, and that week she had had an Office sleepover party with her friends. Not only was it insane for me to hear someone that age loves the show, but this was just one week in the rotation, because they did it every weekend.
Jenna Fischer: I hear a lot from parents who watched the show when it was on originally. They now have kids that are like twelve years old to, like, twenty-two years old, and they’re all discovering it. People who were kind of too young to get it when it came on are now getting it, and there’s this second wave happening. What’s really cool to me is that a lot of those parents are so excited, because they knew it was cool, and now their kids think it’s cool, so they’re cool. They’re like, “See? My kids think I’m cool because I knew about this cool show,” and so they love that they can watch it with their kids.
Kelly Cantley: When I go home, the only show that the cousins and the nieces and nephews, everyone, asks me about is The Office.
Amy Ryan: There’s a lot more recognition now than when it was on the air, but I’m noticing it’s a much younger generation. A lot of my friends who have teenagers, they’ve shared with me that they watch it as almost an emotional soother. If they’re in a bad mood, they’ll just pop on The Office and they’ll binge-watch it. My daughter’s in third grade and some of her friends are watching it now. I’ve gone from “Georgia’s mom” to them looking at me a little differently. It’s like, “You’ve been in my house since kindergarten, you know me. . . .”
Briton W. Erwin: My fifteen-year-old niece is a fanatic and has it playing round the clock all the time.
B. J. Novak: Kids respond more than you’d expect because Michael is such a child emotionally in some ways.
Aaron Shure: Thirteen-year-old boys in particular are about that age where it’s like, “What will it be like to have a job? Will there be love there? Will I be the cool one or the nerdy one?”
Andy Buckley: My twelve-year-old is reluctantly now watching it. All his buddies were watching it and he was purposely avoiding it because I was on it. At the first he was like, “Dad, I don’t want to watch this.” But now he watches all the episodes that I’m not in, which is most of them. The thing is, if you’re in high school or college now you would have probably been too young then. And even people in their twenties, they might have been in high school and they didn’t necessarily watch it. You know, I sit down and watch a few of them from time to time with my son and boy oh boy, it’s so darn funny.
Melora Hardin: I enjoy the success of The Office more now than I did when it was on. People come up to me every day and they’re like, “Oh my God, I just binge-watched the first five seasons.” I actually just ran into a woman on the metro that said, “Oh my God, I just was watching you last night!”
Tucker Gates: I just finished working with Steve Carell on something else and he was telling me that there’s this whole resurgence of it, especially on college campuses, and that he had taken his daughter on a college tour and he got mobbed so much that he couldn’t take her on any of the other college visits and he was really upset about that.
Mari Potis: It definitely shines a different light on Scranton and it’s made us a cool city. We get tons of millennials that come to visit. They wanna go to Steamtown mall and Poor Richard’s and they wanna go get their picture taken at the welcome sign and I’m like, “Well that’s just nuts.” Somebody just had their bridal shower in Scranton this weekend and it was Office themed. Each year the show seems to become more popular.
Robert Durkin (Greater Scranton Chamber of Commerce President and CEO): People still come here on a constant basis to visit places like Poor Richard’s, Cooper’s Seafood House, and Steamtown mall. They might even try to find Lake Scranton, even though you can’t actually drive around it. If any of them contact us I say, “Stop by and we’ll give you a Dunder Mifflin stock certificate.” People seem to get a kick out of that.
Kevin Reilly: I’m involved with Cornell and often I speak at classes, and literally every year someone’s asked me if Andy Bernard is based on me. Literally every year. And it’s a new generation of freshmen every year.
Mark Proksch: I think this is a testament to how actually smart younger people are these days, but also they’re not used to seeing actually funny TV. And if a show is funny to them on TV these days, it’s usually canceled after the first or second season. And so, to know that you have nine seasons of the show, back when they were giving shows twenty-two-, twenty-three-episode orders, that’s something unique to them and it’s a novel idea. That they can keep watching these shows without getting a rerun every few episodes is very rare.
Anthony Farrell: Michael Scott and Dwight are just big kids. Young people are watching these characters because they really are enjoying the silly things that they get up to inside of an office. It’s almost kind of like wishful thinking about what they would be able to do once they go out of school. And The Office is like school, and these kids are getting into all kinds of mischief at school, so I can kind of see why they love it so much. But I’ve been approached by a bunch of people who are like, “My son is so into the show now and he’s thirteen.” Any time I meet people, if I’m working on a kids’ show or whatever and someone’s like, “Oh, can my son come to the set? He wants to talk to you. He knows you wrote on The Office and he’s sixteen and he really wants to ask you questions. He’s seen every episode like four times,” I’m like, “Well, he might know the show better than I know the show at this point. Maybe I can talk to him about some stuff.”
Briton W. Erwin: I think the simple explanation is that the characters may be exaggerated, but they’re all people you know. And people don’t really change that much in the macro sense over time. You always have the guy who thinks he knows everything, and you have, whether you’re in high school or at a job, you have the two people that have a crush on each other but you don’t know if they’re going to get together or not. You have the boss who barely knows what he’s doing but somehow manages to endear himself to people.
Caroline Williams: I think it’s because it’s so timeless in its depiction of life. Also, the characters are weirdly ageless. If you didn’t see Michael and you just read about what he did, it would be unclear how old he is. And Dwight, the same thing. All of them, they kind of inhabit this magical world where it’s always 2003. And everyone is eight. I think there’s so much TV now that there is a show for every niche, and that you can find a show that fits you. The idea that there’s this show that appeals to everybody is just, I think, a unique idea.
J. J. Abrams: All I can say is that when something works as well as it does and is as smartly written as that show was and has the kind of cast that is just undeniable, as that show did, there is a kind of timelessness to it. Certain things can become sort of phenomenons in different moments, different times, different ways. But the way that some series live on, where people will still be laughing at I Love Lucy now so many years later . . . I feel like [when] it’s fifty years, a hundred years from now, I don’t think the discomfort and awkwardness of working with odd people is ever gonna go away and that show captured that beautifully.
Teri Weinberg: It doesn’t matter where you work, what you do, if it was twenty years ago or twenty years from now, people are still going to go into a workplace and they’re going to be surrounded by people that they see day in and day out. And we’re going to feel the growing pains of the economy and what’s happening, and how we have to coexist with people and find the joy in difficult situations, and that you can actually wake up in the morning and laugh with a family of people who you can feel a part of. And The Office is part of that culture. We’re so divided as a nation, we’re so divided as a world, but the one thing that brings us together always is love and smiles and comedy and an outside family that makes you feel a part of it.
The availability of the show on Netflix plays no small role in this since every single episode is on demand and thus it’s effortless to binge.
Brent Forrester: I have some inside information and I don’t know if I’m allowed to know it, but I could say to you that it is fairly well understood by people in the know that The Office is the biggest performer on Netflix, at least in terms of comedies. The way Netflix rates shows is by seasons of TV, so like season five of Friends is like the thirtieth most watched show on Netflix. They do it by season of TV. My understanding is that eight of the top twelve shows on Netflix by viewership are seasons of The Office.
John Krasinski: Netflix is really giving a lot of shows new life, but certainly ours. Maybe you had to be a certain age to be up at nine p.m. and watch it, but you know, you no longer have to do that. You can watch it any time you want. I think that really helps.
Claire Scanlon: Greg was recently showing me how The Office is the number one show on Netflix and I was like, “Holy mackerel.” He was like, “Yeah, I guess we negotiated that deal a little too soon, a little too fast, not realizing all that we were giving them.”
Ben Silverman: Netflix has expanded the reach of The Office and it’s also a giant hit for Comedy Central. Ricky [Gervais], Stephen [Merchant], me, and Greg all own it. Carell has a little bit, as does Universal and NBC. None of us are making as much as we should from it. They didn’t do a good enough deal and NBC is weird about how it accounts for things. But it’s cool because people like it and Angela and Brian and Creed get to go to, like, conventions and Comic-Con.
Bob Greenblatt: I believe it’s the number one or two show on Netflix that they acquired, and there are millions of streams of those episodes. A stream is not the same as a linear rating, so the apples-to-oranges thing comes in, but I believe that Netflix has helped make The Office extraordinarily popular, and more popular than it was when it was on the network. And they pay us a lot of money for it. If we knew how popular it was going to be before they made the deal, we would have asked for more money from them!
Ricky Gervais: It’s still not Seinfeld syndication, nowhere near. And everyone gets a piece of it.
Creed Bratton: I still get paid from it. It’s just the gift that keeps giving in so many ways, so many ways. It frees us all up to do whatever projects we want to do, not for the money but for just the love of a good project. For me, the checks I get are astronomical, certainly more money than I ever would make in my Grass Roots days. No comparison. It’s a whole other ball game. Rarefied earth.
But even though it inspired a handful of mockumentary-style shows (Parks and Recreation, Modern Family, American Vandal) and made the laugh track and most other traditional sitcom elements feel hopelessly dated (not a single NBC show right now utilizes one), most people involved feel it hasn’t changed TV nearly as much as they’d hoped.
Brent Forrester: I spoke to Greg recently and he was a bit concerned that it hadn’t changed television, that it showed that taste makers and lovers of great comedy will give ovations to naturalistic comedy, but it has not changed the tone of comedy overall on network television. It seems like they may have been an outlier. The more realistic a show is, the more you have a chance of emoting and feeling something deep and real. That is why all of these taste-making writers and performers and fans love the show. But I don’t think it changed TV the way everybody involved in the show hoped it would.
Danny Chun: I’ve heard it said that whenever there is something really special and successful in the entertainment industry, the industry will learn all the wrong lessons from it. And I think that’s true in this case. It felt like people thought the lesson was, “Okay, let’s do stuff in a mockumentary style.” And one of them was really successful, Modern Family. Okay, there’s also Parks and Rec, but that didn’t feel very mockumentary to me. So there was this feeling of, “Let’s do shows that look like The Office or that have the same conceit as The Office.” They thought that rather than what I think the real lesson is, that you nurture something comedically, you take a really well-observed, intelligent premise and you let a really excellent writer assemble a team that he or she wants and you have faith in it and you trust it. Obviously, that doesn’t happen very often. But it did with The Office.
Owen Ellickson: There are people who will tell you that it’s a super-grounded show. I think that’s crazy. I think it was grounded in spots, and then unbelievably broad in spots, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think there is a tendency in TV to call anything you liked “grounded” and anything you don’t like “broad.” I think it was both, and it was a good mix of both more often than not. But there weren’t that many talking-head shows that followed. I feel like in some ways there’s The Office, and Parks, and Modern Family, and somehow those three established such a beachhead that people are actually kind of leery of copying. There were some rip-off attempts afterward in the first couple years, but it’s surprising that people don’t do more of that. I feel like in a sort of crass network sense it actually never was profitable enough to change what networks looked for. That’s why I can’t tell how much of a footprint it actually has. I almost feel like if it had more of a footprint maybe it would have less of a following now.
Mark Proksch: I think it’s a seminal show and I think it’s a classic TV show already and that’s proven by those Netflix numbers, but it certainly didn’t change network TV. Network TV still tries to just put models, both male and female, into comedies, thinking that, “Oh, it will work.” And they shoehorn in the goofy actor for the crazy role. They don’t understand that you have to have really good scripts, first of all, bring in actual funny people even if they’re not famous yet. I mean, I really do not think that they could make Seinfeld nowadays. Those actors weren’t models. They weren’t beautiful looking and most of them were relatively unknown. Same with The Office. People love this show because it was clever and it had a point of view. You cannot tell me Abby’s [a recent show about beautiful people at a San Diego bar that NBC canceled after ten episodes] had a point of view.
For the two original creators who merely wanted to make a handful of episodes on BBC Two about a goofy office, the incredible afterlife is still a little hard to understand, especially when it started getting remade in countries like India, Sweden, Germany, Chile, and the Czech Republic.
Ricky Gervais: I’ve never known [of] a sitcom, particularly a British one, getting remade in so many countries.
Stephen Merchant: We worked quite hard early on to identify what seemed like truthful observations about office life. We felt like there were lots of shows that had taken place in offices, but they were normally just a background to kind of high jinks in the foreground. And there was something about the actual mechanics of the office itself, the literal day-to-day goings-on, that hadn’t been mined sufficiently, whether it was health and safety training or people were coming in from outside to sort of teach you how to do your job better. I think the urge we had to be observational and authentic and sort of precise is I think one of the reasons it has both translated to America and elsewhere, because I think the observations are truthful. I don’t know what it says about mankind that clearly office life in many, many countries is very similar. Which I guess is a good thing? I guess it brings us together? But it also suggests that we’re all living these quiet lives of despair in one way or another.