Steve Carell looks down at his Office family with pride.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: 57.1 billion. That’s how many minutes people watched The Office in 2020, according to Nielsen. That’s about four billion more minutes than people watched the series in 2018.
PAUL LIEBERSTEIN: What? Holy . . .
There haven’t been new episodes of The Office since 2013. But somehow, it’s become a bigger cultural phenomenon than it ever was during its initial run. A survey by research firm Maru/Matchbox found that more people signed up for a video streaming service in 2021 to watch The Office than any other licensed TV show, including heavy hitters like Grey’s Anatomy and The Simpsons.
RAINN WILSON: Oh my God, that’s nuts. People just need to get a life. Listen, people, I love you all. Thank you for watching The Office. But there are so many other great shows out there.
Rainn is right, but rarely do even the best of those shows achieve anything approaching the success of The Office. Consider this: Every TV pilot made has only a 6 percent chance of airing on television, according to Variety. Of those that do get picked up—there are roughly five hundred original, scripted TV series made every year—only 35 percent will air longer than a single season. An even lower percentage of shows get syndicated. And of those that do get a second life in repeats, just a handful continue to get discovered by younger audiences.
So how did The Office pull off this hat trick? How does a show about a tiny paper company in Scranton, Pennsylvania, made during an era when you still had to memorize phone numbers and a subscription to Netflix involved using a mailbox, become a timeless phenomenon?
We’re still trying to figure it out. We’re still shocked when complete strangers, some who were barely out of diapers when The Office first aired, walk up to us like we’re old friends.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I can’t go into a bar without getting multiple drinks [bought for me]. It comes to the point where I have to say, “No, I’m good. I gotta stop now, guys.” I am such a huge sports fan, and I’ll play in these celebrity golf tournaments and meet all of these athletes who want to hang out with me because of the show. It’s just so crazy.
PHYLLIS SMITH: At least people call you Kevin. When people shout “Phyllis,” I have to think for a moment: “Have our paths crossed? Do I know you?” Did I go to school with them or what? But in reality, they do know me, because I’ve been in their bedrooms and their living rooms and their kitchens, before they go to work and as they go to sleep. We are a part of their lives, you know? I’ll meet someone and they’ll ask, “We’ve met before, right?”
GREG DANIELS: You guys in the cast feel it more than I do, ’cause I walk around and it doesn’t come up all the time. But if I walk around with Paul [Lieberstein], it comes up. I was just walking down the street with Paul the other day and I heard this squeal of car brakes. Somebody turned his car around and did a U-turn ’cause he saw Paul out of the corner of his eye, and he jumped out to tell him how much the show meant to him.
ANDY BUCKLEY: I have a ton of fun with it now. I purposely walk around wearing my David Wallace glasses or a Dunder Mifflin shirt. Like if I’m doing a corporate speaking thing, I know why I’m there. It’s not ’cause of my incredible Silk Stalkings performance. It’s so much more fun for photos if I’m in the Dunder Mifflin shirt.
We’ve had a few celebrity fans over the years. And like so many others, they’d discovered us long after the show ended. John Legend joked on Twitter in 2018 that he once invested in the Michael Scott Paper Company. Jennifer Garner and her kids binged The Office in 2020, and she shared an Instagram video of her crying after watching the finale, saying that the show “gave me some really big feelings.” And then there’s a certain beloved U.S. president, one Barack Obama.
OSCAR NUÑEZ: Steve came in with this letter and he was like, “You guys might want to read this.” It said something like, “Dear Steve, I just want you to know that at the White House, The Office Thursday is family night.” It was a letter that the president sent to Steve Carell because the Obamas are fans of the show.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: That’s kind of a big deal.
OSCAR NUÑEZ: Steve said he showed it to his children, and they were little and they’re like, “Can we touch?” And he’s like, “Nope, just look. Just look.” [Laughs.]
JOHN KRASINSKI: It’s the difference between fans who feel like they’re a part of something and fans who just watch something. There are very few things that I watched when I was a kid that I felt connected to. It was more like, “Oh, I liked the movie E.T.,” but I never felt like the people [who starred in the movie] and I shared a life moment together. If I’d ever met Chris Farley, I would have said that, ’cause I watched Tommy Boy so many times, and he didn’t know he was my best friend, but he was my best friend. Probably the closest I ever came was meeting Conan O’Brien when I was his intern.
John, along with Ellie Kemper, Mindy Kaling, and Angela Kinsey, was an intern on Late Night with Conan O’Brien.
JOHN KRASINSKI: Because I was like, “I think you’re the most talented person I’ve ever come in contact with.” I think that our fans see me, and instead of going up to an actor to get a picture, they’re actually seeing a friend of theirs that just happens to be in the same city. No one looked at Jack Ryan—
John began playing the iconic Tom Clancy character in 2018 on Amazon Prime.
JOHN KRASINSKI: —and was like, “Oh my God, my buddy Jack Ryan! You’re an actor, I didn’t realize.” They do think that with Jim. They think they know him. I had one woman who insisted we went to school together. I was like, “I don’t think we did.” And she went, “Yes, we did.” So I went, “Where did you go to school?” She said some school and I went, “I did not go to that school.” And she went, “Yes, you did!” I was like, “Okay,” and then I left.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Do your kids watch The Office?
STEVE CARELL: Never.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: No? Come on.
STEVE CARELL: I completely get it. Like, why would you? That’s just weird to watch your dad do that thing. Although my daughter’s a freshman in college, and she’s taking a course in communications and [laughs] the subject matter is the paradox of comedy or something. They are studying an episode of The Office, which she’s never seen. She texted me like, “That was really funny.” [Laughs.] Oh, thanks, hun. But she said, “It’s so weird. I never thought I would be studying something that my father was in for a course.”
Kids aren’t just learning about The Office from their college curriculum. They’re discovering it on their own. Which is kind of confounding, given that they’re growing up in a world that couldn’t be more different from our show. Why are younger generations so fascinated with a TV show about working adults who somehow survived without smartphones or social media?
Steve Carell looks down at his Office family with pride.
STEVE CARELL: That was always a shock to me. When we were making the show, I thought, “Well, people who’ve worked in an office environment will have a context. I think they’ll have something in here they can relate to.” But the fact that not only teenagers but also preteens have taken to it? It’s shocking that these younger generations . . . God, I sound like I’m eighty years old. But it almost seems to have been passed down from their older siblings. Like, “I’m seventeen, I’m going to college next year. Hey, twelve-year-old brother or sister, check this out.”
ANGELA KINSEY: My daughter is eleven and she’d never seen the show. She grew up on the set. She was born in season five. She was there every day. I had a little baby nursery trailer right on the set. But when she came back to school this year—she’s in fifth grade—she said, “Mom, everyone in my class watched The Office over the summer. Everyone.” I see kids I’ve known since kindergarten in Dunder Mifflin shirts. She was like, “Can I watch it now?” I was like, “Okay, all right, fine.” I think there’s some content that might not be appropriate, but we’ll muscle through it together. She’s into it and my stepsons are into it. They’re eleven and nine. They love it. And I feel like they see me in a different way now. My own kids are like, “Wow, you did that?” I’m like, “What do you guys think I do when I leave here?” “Mom, you did something other than get me some Goldfish [crackers] and pretzels? Wow.”
JOHN KRASINSKI: A four-year-old came up to me at the airport and was like, “It’s my favorite show.” And I was like, “Do you get any of it?” And they’re like, “Yeah, it’s totally universal.” [Laughs.]
BRENT FORRESTER: I watched the whole thing, from beginning to end, with my daughter when she was fourteen, and that gave me an emotional connection to the show that was even greater than what I had when I was there. It makes me very proud to be part of that. It makes my daughter look up to me just a little bit, which is extremely unusual and rare. I’ll take it.
OSCAR NUÑEZ: When we started doing those Office Conventions, people were coming in with eleven-year-olds and they’re like, “Look, my kid watches the show.” Sometimes it was eight-year-olds. Is that good? And they’re like, “Yeah, they love it. It’s fine.”
RAINN WILSON: Here’s where I feel really bad sometimes. I had a little girl come up to me and say, “I’ve watched every episode of The Office fifteen times.” This girl was like fourteen and her mom was there. I was like, “You are the world’s worst mother. Your daughter could have learned Italian. She could have learned to play the tuba. You literally could write a doctoral thesis in that many hours. That is crazy.”
CLAIRE SCANLON: My peers didn’t watch [The Office] when I was working on it, but they’re watching it now with their children because their children are making them. Nine-year-olds love Dwight, and they grow into it and then they want to be Jim and Pam. It’s like role-playing.
GREG DANIELS: At first, I didn’t understand why it would be appealing to kids. But it’s actually really similar to the experience of being a kid in school. Your teacher is your boss, and you’re sitting at your little desk next to somebody else who you may or may not like, and you’re compelled to listen to whatever boring crap is coming down from above.
KEVIN MALONE: Sometimes I feel like everyone I work with is an idiot. And by sometimes I mean all times. All the times. Every of the time.
KATE FLANNERY: Michael Scott, he’s the boss, but he’s like the teacher. I think kids can relate to having to sit next to someone that they didn’t necessarily pick but they’re kind of stuck with for years.
CLAIRE SCANLON: You see a lot of the same dynamics in school. There’s a bully and there’s someone who stands up for the little guy. It’s all played out in The Office.
STEVE CARELL: They’re archetypes. And even though [these characters] are grown and some are middle-aged, teens can relate to those archetypes.
EMILY VANDERWERFF: I talked to a twelve-year-old girl who loves this show. She’s watched it four or five times, and it’s a thing she can watch with her parents. It’s a thing she can watch with her friends. But one of the things she told me was, she’s got a Dwight in her class. These relationships scale. These relationships are in her seventh grade class and they’re in a nursing home. Literally everybody alive has a relationship like that with somebody. As soon as you get past the very basic “being a little kid and only caring about your own needs” phase and start to realize other people exist and have their own needs, then you start to realize there are Dwights in the world, and Michaels and Jims and Pams and Ryans. That specificity applies to all age groups.
VEDA SEMARNE (SCRIPT SUPERVISOR): The characters are kind of misfits. And they’re all very flawed, which gives you that kind of cringe feeling when you watch it. Especially Michael Scott and his obvious need for love and respect from everyone. You can identify with them and in different ways. I think that’s what kids relate to, you know? They’re all dealing with pretty difficult issues and identity issues and things that kids have to deal with, finding the right friends and being part of things or being left out of things. All those issues are important to kids.
Love and Tragedy: The happy couple (and Michael Scott).
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I think the show appeals to young people who feel marginalized either because of their age or bullying or they don’t quite fit in. The Office appreciates people of all shapes and sizes and denominations and creeds. And it does it in a funny way.
AMY RYAN: I have friends who tell me their kids watch it for its soothing effects. If they’re having a bad day, they go and pop in The Office and it lifts them.
GREG DANIELS: The society we live in is so often winner-driven and celebrity-driven and rich-people-driven. To have this slice of ordinariness matters.
EMILY VANDERWERFF: In the last fifteen-ish years, American capitalism has gone insane. Everything is awful now. And I say this from a position of relative privilege, but we live in a world where it feels like capitalism no longer cares about the average worker. The Office, when it started, was a show that captured the drudgery of workaday life. But it’s become an escapist fantasy. There are no Dunder Mifflins left. If you made The Office today, you’d have to come up with some other business that they all work at. People ask why this show is so popular with Generation Z. I don’t know that they’re cognizant of this, but if you’re seventeen years old, you’re going to graduate into a workforce that doesn’t have jobs like this for you. It just has a lot of gig economy work, driving Ubers or renting out your apartment on Airbnb, stuff that is by definition unstable and does not provide firm ground to stand on. Say what you will about Dunder Mifflin. I bet all of those people had a solid health plan. Now we live in a world where Dunder Mifflin seems like a great place to go. It seems like Oz, and that’s weird and fucked up and says something about our society. It also says something about our society that this show is so popular that we can be like, “Oh, look at this escapist fantasy about working at a paper company.”
A big reason The Office appeals to so many generations, young and old, is that it never felt like a show that belonged to a certain era. Sure, it had a few pop culture references—“Lazy Scranton,” the Saturday Night Live “Lazy Sunday” homage, and Michael declaring, “I am Beyoncé, always”—but watching it never seems like unlocking a time capsule from a bygone decade.
RAINN WILSON: You watch other shows like Desperate Housewives and it looks so dated. But in The Office, no one’s fashionable. People are wearing that same kind of Sears and JCPenney crap in Scranton now as they were twenty years ago, as they were forty years ago. You can’t even tell what time it’s set in. Is it contemporary? Is it the nineties? Is it the eighties? Is it ten years ago? You can’t really tell. There are a few Obama jokes in there, but there’s a timelessness that Greg wove into The Office.
KEVIN REILLY: There were no hairstyles. There’s no “Oh, that was an eighties outfit,” or “Ooh, look at that palette or music choice.” The Office was just drab. And the drab then is the same as the drab today.
MIKE SCHUR: We used to try constantly to put pop culture references in the show. And Greg was like, “No, this show needs to feel timeless. Like it could be happening at any moment in time from the seventies until like 2050.” And I remember thinking at the time, “All right, you’re pretty high on yourself there, bud, thinking that this show is going to matter [in the future].” And now look, it’s twenty years later and it matters just as much. My son doesn’t know that that show isn’t on the air. He was born in season four and he’s now eleven, and he just watched every single episode and every kid in his grade watches every single episode. It doesn’t feel dated.
PAUL FEIG: Monty Python and the Holy Grail is one of my favorite movies, because every scene that comes up, you’re like, “This is my favorite scene. Oh wait, no, this is my favorite scene.” That’s what The Office is. You love these characters and you remember these moments and you can watch them over and over again, because they’re not trying too hard and they’re not joke, joke, joke. The humor is behavioral and beautiful and relatable.
PAUL LIEBERSTEIN: In a way, it was built for streaming. The best streaming is lightly serialized. We were doing that with no knowledge of what streaming was. That was just how we thought the show would be best. We told stories over years and we told them in mini-arcs.
Mini-arcs are basically stories within the series that play out over the course of four to six (and sometimes more) episodes, like Jim’s transfer to the Stamford branch or Holly’s brief tenure as Scranton’s new HR rep.
PAUL LIEBERSTEIN: As a viewer, if I’m watching something on streaming and I have to wait too long for a conclusion, I get really angry and I’m out. The Office had these six-episode arcs. [Each season] was kind of built around, “Okay, what’s happening over these six episodes?” Which is perfect for streaming. It’s very satisfying to watch six episodes, see the beginning of something and see the end of it. Like Michael Scott Paper Company, where he takes a journey over six episodes. By the end of it, we’re back to where we were.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: You can pick up where you left off, and it’s not like you’re scrambling to catch up with the story.
PAUL LIEBERSTEIN: Exactly. There are a few different ways people are watching now. Sometimes you watch an episode or a series of episodes, sometimes you have a certain amount of time and you stop mid-episode. We had very few of those bullshit forced resolution scenes where you got to the end and now this has to happen, you know? So even if you have just three minutes left in an episode . . .
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: It’s not going to be some tedious “we sure survived that crazy thing” wrap-up.
PAUL LIEBERSTEIN: Right. It’s still going to be enjoyable.
Jim’s “mini-arc” at the Stamford branch.
MIKE SCHUR: We did two hundred episodes. There aren’t many shows that do that anymore. That era is over. How many more shows are going to even do a hundred? We’re in an era of six-episode, eight-episode, ten-episode seasons. Even shows that last ten years, they’ll do eighty episodes or something. I think the reason why so many people have discovered The Office and have really sat with it is because you can watch a new episode every night.
EMILY VANDERWERFF: There’s a rhythm to The Office, there’s a quietude to it. There’s something soothing about it, like watching one of those little clackers go back and forth. I’m gonna use a word that a lot of people will think is a criticism, though it’s absolutely not, but there’s a predictability to it.
RAINN WILSON: Greg always said, “It’s 90 percent funny, but 10 percent truthful and moving.” You don’t want to go more than 10 percent, ’cause then it starts to get sentimental and maudlin. But if it has that 10 percent per episode of reality, of truth and real connection, then that grounds the show. That gives it a lot of heart. Also, the style of the comedy never tells you when to laugh or even that you have to laugh. There’s no laugh track. You can choose to laugh at something or not. Maybe the third time you watch it, you find it hysterical and you hadn’t the previous time. There’s a great amount of detail in there, so it stands up to repeated watchings.
MIKE SCHUR: You can’t end an episode without learning something new about someone. In the “Christmas Party” episode with the Yankee swap gift exchange, my original idea for a present for Angela was one of those Joel Osteen self-help-y Christian books. And there was no story with Angela’s gift. It was just like, what would someone get Angela? And Greg was like, “It should be something else.” And I was like, “Okay, why?” He was like, “’Cause we already know that she’s a religious person. You’re not learning anything new by that gift.” And I was like, “God, I’m so annoyed right now. There are so many things going on in this episode and this isn’t even a story point, and you’re telling me to rewrite it?” Then someone else mentioned those ugly photos where they take babies and dress them up in clown costumes or whatever. And I was like, “I can imagine Angela being into that.” It ended up being a key plot point later on [in the season two episode “Conflict Resolution”].
ANGELA: I got this poster for Christmas and I feel I want to see it every day. It makes me feel like the babies are the true artists, and God has a really cute sense of humor.
MICHAEL: Come on. Seriously, that?
OSCAR: I don’t like looking at it. It’s creepy and in bad taste, and it’s just offensive to me. It makes me think of the horrible, frigid stage mothers who forced the babies into it. It’s kitsch. It’s the opposite of art. It destroys art, it destroys souls.
MIKE SCHUR: That’s why you do it this way. Even if it doesn’t matter in that episode, it might end up mattering a whole lot twelve episodes later. I think people settle into the show and watch it because it feels like you’re eating the richest dessert a tiny bit at a time. You can really follow people’s psychologies and their lives as they grow over the course of nine years. A show like that is very rare.
Sunscreen is like a joke: A little goes a long way.
KATE FLANNERY: There are so many subtle things, you can watch it a million times and see different things that you didn’t see before if you weren’t paying attention. There’s so many Easter eggs and weird little things. Like the “Weight Loss” episode [from season five] where people still have questions about Meredith’s skin. There’s a whole story line where Meredith got sun poisoning on a fishing boat and it got worse and worse as the week went on and it never got explained. I remember Steve [Carell] thought it was brilliant that they just didn’t worry about explaining it. ’Cause how many times do you work with people that you’re not that close to and something’s going on and you’re like, “I don’t even want to know.” You know what I mean?
CLAIRE SCANLON: I always get so frustrated working on anything new where they underestimate the sophistication of the audience. I feel like so many shows are like, “We need to signpost that.” Or in other words, you need to announce to the viewer what you’re gonna do. Show them what you did and then remind them what you just did. You’re going to signpost it all the way through. It’s always better to be a step ahead of the audience. They will catch up. They are smart and they can sniff out phoniness so quickly, you know? Most of the stuff I’ve done in reality TV, you can’t cheat. You can’t fabricate something. You can’t make someone into a bad guy who isn’t. Your audience is way too sophisticated. The same is true for scripted television. If you’re pandering, it never works.
JOHN KRASINSKI: It wasn’t born out of a fad or a trend or where things were headed. It was its own thing and remained its own thing. And it never changed, in my opinion. Greg never changed the DNA of the show to reflect what people are into. His whole thing was like, “We’ll just keep the show in our small pond. And if you want to come and visit our small pond, you can visit any time.” I think my taste level became solidified on that show, probably without me even knowing. I see what’s possible now in everything I do. I never would have directed and written [the 2018 feature film] A Quiet Place if it wasn’t for Greg. Because I remember him saying to me one day, “Don’t look at this as a comedy. Just be in the moment. Your character doesn’t know he’s funny. We get to decide. So we’re not making a comedy, we’re just telling the best story we can. And if you end up laughing at what we’re doing, great. If you cry at a moment with Pam, great. But just tell the best story.” When I got offered A Quiet Place, I was like, I don’t know anything about horror. I remember actually sitting down before I wrote the script and saying, “I’m not gonna make a horror movie. I’m not gonna make a genre movie. I’m going to tell the best story I can about this family. And if you end up getting scared at moments, that’s on you. Because my only job is to tell you the most concise and strong story I can. And then every emotional thing that you feel is coming from you and how you’re experiencing it.” I never would have had the guts to do that, because I would’ve said the same thing I said to Greg that day, which was, “I don’t want to mess this up. I want to make sure I’m really funny in the scene for you.” And he was like, “No, no, no. I don’t want you to be funny. I want to tell the best story and let other people decide whether the scene is funny.”
GREG DANIELS: The approach we took valued character comedy and behavior as opposed to jokes. Jokes kinda don’t last that long. But you fall in love with the characters and you always have something to see. It gave so much re-watchability to it. You can watch the entire show looking at one character, and it’s interesting ’cause they’re doing their own thing, being funny in the background.
PAUL FEIG: There are few shows in my life that you just want to watch over and over again. Taxi was that way. All in the Family and Seinfeld. But The Office is always going to be that because it’s just comfort food, you know? It’s so relaxing to sit with these people. I love the fact that we didn’t have any score. There was no music on the show. Our sound mixes were always about like, where do we put the phone ringing? We were always placing phones ringing in the background. It just became this really low-key, relaxing, happy place that you can go to.
ANGELA KINSEY: You turn it on and you know where everyone’s going to be. You know where Pam is at reception, you know where everybody sits in accounting. Those people become like your extended family. And you’re just sort of checking in with them. I have people tell me all the time that they put it on at the end of a long day or a bad day, or maybe if there’s something they’re anxious about. They put it on and it’s just comfort.
ED HELMS: Dunder Mifflin is kind of aggressively mundane, but when you look closely and you get in the hearts of these people, it’s enormously complex and beautiful and familiar all at once.
ALLISON JONES: I think everybody can relate to working in an office like that and not everybody can relate to [the TV show] Friends. You can insert yourself into The Office very easily. There must be some comfort in that.
JEN CELOTTA: I read that [pop superstar] Billie Eilish has watched the entire series, every episode, at least eleven times, and she has it on the background sometimes when she’s in her tour bus.
An aggressively mundane “Costume Party” at Dunder Mifflin.
PAUL FEIG: It just makes you feel good about your life and it makes you feel good about other people. It makes you tolerant of other people in a weird way, because you’re watching such a diverse group of folks that have no reason to be together, other than the fact that they are trapped within this building. You don’t choose to be there, other than I guess you could leave if you want it, but you can’t really. There’s just something very lovely about that. People will be watching this show for as long as the planet exists.
EMILY VANDERWERFF: There’s another thing about this show that kept coming up when I talk to people who are fans. They were like, “This is my go-to for when I have anxiety. This is my go-to for when I have depression. This is my go-to for when I’m struggling.” Real life feels huge all the time. Real life is hard to deal with for anybody, and that probably goes for Steve Carell too, even though he’s a very successful actor and seems like a very nice man. But I’m sure he has days when he just doesn’t want to get out of bed. I talked to so many people who said, “When I am anxious, this is the show I turn to.” It’s another world to escape into.
JENNA FISCHER: I am most proud of the show being a thing that comforts people when they are in pain or suffering grief. I hear so often from people who are sick or have lost a child; they tell me that the first time they laughed after this loss in their life was watching our show. I am so honored to be a part of something that brings comfort to people. And I get it because I have suffered losses in my life and I have turned to entertainment to get me through. Hearing that people just have it on in the background and that it’s part of their home life as they cook dinner and things like that—it’s just deeply meaningful to me. All I wanted was a job. I just wanted to be a working actor. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that I would be part of something so special and so meaningful. I try to live up to that responsibility.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I was recently doing something in South Carolina and I went to the children’s hospital there. They asked me to come and say hi to some of the kids, and of course I said yes. I was there with a few other people and we were going from room to room. There was someone there who was kind of prepping, going in and making sure that we were allowed to go into the next room, that there wasn’t a nurse there or whatever. She came back and told me, “Okay, this next room . . . he doesn’t know that you’re here. And we haven’t told his mom and dad.” I go walking in and there’s this boy on the bed and there are tubes. I mean, he’s clearly suffering a tremendous amount, and he’s lying there in bed and he’s watching The Office on TV.
JENNA FISCHER: And then you’re going to walk in?
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: They didn’t even tell me! I walked in the room and I saw what was happening and saw his face and I went, “Yeah.” I mean, this is what it’s about, right? This is why I’m doing this and not theater anymore.
CRAIG ROBINSON: People have these stories of, you know, “My mother had cancer and we watched The Office and we got through this.” It’ll be these incredible heart-wrenching stories like, “Our family doesn’t talk, but we bond over The Office.” Why the hell is this show still relevant after being off the air for so many years? I think that’s a big part of it. People really connect through the show with family members or whoever.
GREG DANIELS: We used to have a lot of visitors from different Make-A-Wish type things. I always thought that was indicative of something. People with all these health problems would get so much solace out of the show. I always was proud of that, but I didn’t really know what it was. But it seems like it was a valuable thing to have made. We did a good job making it, and people like it and it provides something good for them.
CLAIRE SCANLON: I’m not a religious person, but I can see why people go to the church of The Office. Because I do think it espouses the best version of religion. It’s not about getting rich. It’s not about being popular. It’s about being happy and being kind to others. I mean, do you see people being so kind to each other on other shows?
RAINN WILSON: We weren’t trying to do this, but I do believe that The Office was a spiritual show. When I talk to people, any time I’m recognized, people will say, “Thank you for the show. My parents were getting a divorce or my little brother had cancer, and we would watch it together and we would cry. It got me through some of the hardest times.” Every day there are people writing on my Facebook, “[The Office] got me through such hard times. I was going through depression, I had anxiety and mental health issues, and The Office got me through that.” We made something that ultimately made people laugh and got their minds off their problems. That’s really what people need now. At the end of the day, it’s not a cynical show. It’s people that do love each other, as weird as it is, and it’s been a positive force in the world.
BRENT FORRESTER: A great writer named Mike Reiss, an original Simpsons guy, told me that the secret to every hit network TV show is the subtext of family. I believe that’s true, and it’s definitely true of The Office. And it’s true of the actors on The Office as well. You can feel that love that they have for each other and the respect they have for each other’s performances. There are certain shows that make you feel good about liking them. People liked Frasier more than they actually liked it because it made them feel smart. The Office has a little bit of that. It has to do with behavior over banter, and a priority on realism. These were phrases that flowed through the Office writers’ room and are the hallmarks of good taste in drama and comedy. So the young people know that they have good taste by liking it.
RAINN WILSON: All great television is about unlikely families, and The Office is the most unlikely family. And you love to be with that family. There’s something really soothing about showing up, hearing that theme song.
OSCAR NUÑEZ: No matter what Michael Scott did, he was still protected and loved in the office. No matter how awful he was, we knew his little brain was broken and he really didn’t mean it. We all protected each other through all our foibles, the backstabbing, the insanity. There were always people looking out for each other. [My character] made out with Angela’s fiancé, and I was still, “Angela, you can stay with me.” Dwight was crazy, but Jenna loved him and took care of him. They were BFFs. So those things were very sweet. The only relationship that never worked was Michael and Toby. Toby can never win Michael Scott over. Other than that, it was fine.
CLAIRE SCANLON: It’s giving equal time to lots of people who don’t normally get that. I mean, just the fact that the show’s moral compass is a woman. Everyone’s got their stories, whether you’re a Latino gay man or an African American heavyset man or heavyset woman. What other prime-time show had some of the heartfelt moments that Phyllis got? I keep coming back to that word, “humanity,” but it really is a utopian society. It’s not shocking that kids are gravitating towards that today, because I think we see just the opposite every day in the news and it’s so disheartening. I want to go live in Scranton, in the world of The Office.
An Office family “Fun Run.”
RAINN WILSON: I’ve talked to so many young people that have said, “I want to work in an office just like in Dunder Mifflin.” They’re thinking somehow, out in the workaday world, that it’s going to be even remotely like The Office. [Laughs.] The most wrong-headed thing known to man.
ED HELMS: There’s something I think that makes people want to be a part of that Dunder Mifflin family when they watch it. It’s mundane, but it’s gettable, it’s understandable, and it doesn’t change. The people in that office go through so many things, but you never question whether they’re going to be there the next day. You never question whether they love each other still.
JENNA FISCHER: People always ask us if we’re all really friends in real life. And I don’t even think saying that we’re friends in real life accurately communicates how deeply I feel for everybody [from the cast]. It’s like a love of family. I can’t explain it. Do you think if we’d made the show in the age of smartphones and whatnot, that we would be as deeply connected? It was the circumstances of us being trapped on set for the first season with no working computers, no phones, no internet, nothing. Just a troupe of actors and artists trapped in a room for twelve hours a day, playing. I mean, we improvised constantly and played constantly. We never absorbed ourselves in our phones or emails or anything. I think that lent itself to something, to part of the magic. If you tried to put us all in a room today, we’d just be at our desks on our phones.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: In a world that’s in constant upheaval, I think The Office might be just what we need.
CREED BRATTON: If you wanted to work with people and make relationships, you’d want to be at Dunder Mifflin. Not at an impersonal Staples, because you get lost. The Office is like Mayberry in a way. It’s Green Acres. There are trees outside. It’s autumn and they go to work at Dunder Mifflin and see the seasons go by, and babies are born and people fall in love and out of love and it’s sweet. We need that stuff in our lives. We’re losing a lot of it, unfortunately.
JEN CELOTTA: There’s something happening right now where everybody is so fragmented and so divided. You can kind of retreat into The Office when things are chaotic outside. I know these people, they’re like me. I feel safe here. I felt that way with the Mr. Rogers movie. I was like, “Oh God, just come hug me, Mr. Rogers, again and again.” There’s like a weird thing that’s almost subversive. It makes you feel you can kind of disappear with them and stay with them for a while.
Talking about what made The Office so remarkable isn’t an easy task, especially for the people who created it. Mark Twain once compared analyzing comedy to dissecting a frog: “You learn how it works,” Twain wrote, “but you end up with a dead frog.” (Some sources attribute the frog anecdote to E. B. White.) Greg Daniels has a similar analogy.
GREG DANIELS: There’s that parable of the centipede. They have hundreds of legs, and when the centipede tried to think about how it was that his legs all work properly, they all got tangled up and he couldn’t walk anymore. There’s something that always makes me worried when I talk about comedy. I don’t want to lose the ability to do it.
But let’s try anyway. The secret to The Office’s success and longevity may be contained in the very last lines of the show, written by Greg Daniels, which Pam shares in her final talking head interview. We quoted these lines earlier, but let’s bring them back:
PAM: I thought it was weird when you picked us to make a documentary. But all in all . . . I think an ordinary paper company like Dunder Mifflin was a great subject for a documentary. There’s a lot of beauty in ordinary things. Isn’t that kind of the point?
Was it the point? Did Pam stumble upon the single idea that defined why The Office mattered (and continues to matter) to so many people?
PHYLLIS SMITH: That is beautiful.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Greg’s pretty smart.
JOHN KRASINSKI: My brain just exploded again.
MIKE SCHUR: There were a bunch of phrases that became mantras early on [in the series]. Greg’s number one most repeated one was “truth and beauty.” He was like, “Everything that we make should be true and it should be real.” The attempt should be to find the beauty in whatever you’re doing in the writing and the acting and the directing and the set design and the costumes and everything. Truth and beauty, truth and beauty. It just got deeply ingrained in us. He gave us an analogy for what the show was in the first season. He was like, “Imagine a completely paved parking lot in an office park, with just cracked asphalt and yellow parking lines. It’s stretching out as far as you can see. You’re walking across it and it’s a hot day and you’re in a corporate industrial wasteland. Then you look down and there’s a crack in the asphalt and there’s a single little dandelion growing through the crack. That’s what the show is. It’s finding that dandelion. Finding that little tiny glimmer of truth and beauty and happiness in an aggressively unbeautiful landscape.”
GREG DANIELS: That was my thing with Randall [Einhorn]. I would go, “Truth and beauty, truth and beauty.”
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: And what did that mean to you?
GREG DANIELS: I’m not sure where that came from. Some Romantic poet, somebody like John Keats or something. I don’t know. And I don’t even know what he meant by it.
In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” an 1819 poem by the English Romantic poet John Keats, he wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
GREG DANIELS: But the way I used it with Randall was, let the camera seek out truth. That’s what it’s trying to find. That’s the point of a documentary, right? What’s the truth? Not like a cynical, negative truth. Where’s the beauty? It’s another principle of photography, finding the little weed coming through the crack in the concrete. You know what I mean? Where are you going to find something that’s inspiring but in a truthful way?
On The Office, there was truth and beauty everywhere, from the cameras barely capturing Jim and Pam’s first kiss with a long shot through the window blinds, to Michael falling in love with Pam’s painting of Dunder Mifflin, to just the simple ways these characters found dignity and joy in the tedious nine-to-five world of a low-level paper company.
KEN KWAPIS: I wonder if the show’s continued popularity has to do with the fact that it does feel so real to people. It doesn’t feel like a show. Most of us do work in really dreary jobs and feel trapped in the workplace. And I feel like the show really honors that experience. I have a younger brother who works at a store in our hometown. And when you go in, behind the counter of the store there are all the Office bobbleheads. All of them. I think, in a weird way, it’s less about the fact that I worked on this show and more about the fact that working people connect with these characters.
EMILY VANDERWERFF: The Office lives in those little tiny moments of solidarity, of friendship, of love. When we talk about striving for the American dream, the American dream is not just “I’m going to get the biggest house,” or “I’m gonna get the best car” or “marry the most beautiful person, the most handsome person.” The American dream is you find a place where you belong and where you feel like you have people who care about you, who want the best for you, and you’re all working toward a common goal. Too often American pop culture forgets that. It’s about getting the best house and the best car and the most beautiful spouse. That’s fine, that’s fun. That’s a wish-fulfillment fantasy. I want superpowers too. But there is a beauty in that solidarity, in that meeting of minds, in the way that a collective of people becomes something greater than itself. That is its own kind of American dream. And I think that was an American dream. I don’t know if The Office consciously did this, but it tapped into it. And I think that’s why it was so meaningful for so many people. I think that’s why people keep coming back to it. It is a kind of dream we forget to have for ourselves too often.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Michael’s journey is essentially the journey of the show for the first seven seasons. Whatever he’s searching for, there is a fragment of the American dream there. He’s searching for a family, and ultimately his love of the people he works with transitions and becomes Holly.
Realizing the American dream.
PAUL FEIG: Yeah, totally. He’s looking for success and he’s looking for love and he’s looking for acceptance, and that’s kind of all any of us really want. Maybe even in that order. But we’re all trying to find it in whatever situation we end up in. Some of us get to pick the situation we’re in, but most of us don’t, you know? That’s what’s so lovely about The Office. We drive past these places every single day. Anywhere you are, every time you’re driving, you go past these industrial parks. Every one of these places is filled with people who have hopes and dreams. This show is like, if you just took a camera and you’re driving down the street and tossed a coin and said, “Let’s stop here, let’s just go and see what they’re all about.” You would find a million interesting stories. You’d find the funniest people in the world. You’d find the saddest people in the world. You’d find happy people, all that stuff. So yeah, it really is the American dream portrayed in a way that makes you not feel bad about your life.
So maybe that’s it. The Office was looking for the American dream and found it in the least likely place possible. The show’s appeal certainly had a lot to do with how it was constructed, and the cast of ordinary-looking people who weren’t always winners, and the mix of subversive, cringe-y humor with sincerity, and of course the love stories. But the real spark at the center, the show’s beating heart, was something less tangible, an idea that was only whispered behind the scenes and wasn’t spoken out loud until the very end: truth and beauty in the ordinary things.
GREG DANIELS: I think that idea was very connected to the whole fabric of the show from the get-go. And it may be why it resonated. It’s saying that real life matters, and real people are interesting. I mean, that’s sort of the point of a documentary, right? The voice of the show is a very humanistic voice. If there’s a message there, it’s about the importance of decency and caring for each other, and that ordinary lives are worthy of being on TV.
Thank you for visiting Dunder Mifflin.