A promotional still from the early seasons of The Office.
Among Netflix’s many cruel inventions – its insistence on auto-playing clips from movies and TV series as users hover over the titles; its goofy algorithmic recommendations; its determination for audiences to never, ever watch a program’s end credits – the streaming giant’s most perverse creation might be its “skip intro” option. Especially when offered during an episode of The Office.
Who, exactly, is out there binging the sitcom and eager to miss the most soothing 27 seconds in network television history? The extreme sense of calm that the series’ opening credits offer – from its scenes of a wintry Scranton, Pa., to its concise character introductions to its twinkly, jingly theme song – is Pavlovian. The introduction portends 22 miraculous minutes where extreme cringe comedy can sit alongside moments of pure heart, as if it was the most natural combination in the world. It all underlines the fact that The Office is pure comfort TV. And as the entire world knows right now, we can use all the comfort that we can get.
I’m not going to pretend that the warm and fuzzy benefits of watching The Office is some new phenomenon that I’m breaking here. The series was one of NBC’s biggest draws when it originally aired on the network from 2005 through 2013. Its syndicated repeats rank as the most-watched programming on Comedy Central and TBS. And it is a certified hit of the streaming age, with frequent reports that The Office is not only the most-watched series in Netflix’s endless vault of comedy content, but the most-watched Netflix offering, period. (Little wonder that NBC Universal announced last year that it would free The Office from Netflix’s clutches in 2021, to lure audiences to its own forthcoming streaming service, Peacock.)
So: Audiences have been discovering, and rediscovering, The Office long before anyone sought easy domestic distraction from COVID-19. But as a devoted fan of the series – yes, I am one of those annoying people who insist you watch Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s British production first; who owns all the DVDs and Blu-rays; who possesses battle-worn pamphlets from pub trivia nights; who knows more about the corporate structure of fictional paper company Dunder Mifflin than is healthy for someone who has never stepped inside the show’s writers’ room – I can say with confidence that The Office is the tonic that we all deserve and need right now.
The appeal of The Office is not a mystery – the show is funny as hell, has an excellent cast and wears its heart on its sleeve. Showrunner Greg Daniels (King of the Hill, The Simpsons) and his murderer’s row of writers (Mindy Kaling, Paul Lieberstein, B.J. Novak, Jennifer Celotta, Michael Schur, Larry Wilmore and so many more) took Gervais and Merchant’s original concept – what if an unseen documentary crew chronicled the humdrum day-to-day of a flailing paper company’s regional office, overseen by a gigantic boob of a boss? – and added a spin that was American in concept but not too American in sensibility. Meaning: Let’s make these people lovable in their quirks, but not in a hacky everyone-learns-a-lesson kind of way.
There is an edge and deliberate ugliness to The Office that recalls the anti-sitcom philosophy of Seinfeld at its best – but without the sitcom tactics that Seinfeld was forced by its laugh-track-heavy era to employ. To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David’s famous mantra, The Office has no learning, but lots of hugging.
A new book by Rolling Stone journalist Andy Greene, The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s, attempts to dig a little deeper into the series’ lasting appeal and it couldn’t have been published at a better time. But Greene’s 447 pages of oral history mostly repeat the same three factors recounted above, and known by heart to any Office devotee: the show is funny, it is warm and it had the good fortune to star Steve Carell as the world’s best bad boss, Michael Scott.
Things may have gone differently – for The Office, for Netflix, and for our current sense of self-care – if Carell didn’t star in Judd Apatow’s sleeper comedy The 40-Year-Old Virgin between seasons one and two.
But fortunately the sometimes diametrically opposed end-games of the television and movie industries aligned the summer of 2005, and suddenly NBC had a movie star on its prime-time schedule, no matter how poorly critics and audiences reacted to the series’ initial (and honestly very shaky) first batch of episodes.
Over seven seasons, The Office turned Carell into one of the most beloved characters of the medium, while Carell turned The Office into the platonic ideal of the modern sitcom. (We could rag on the show’s last two Carell-less seasons, but they’re more silly episodes than genuinely bad ones.)
Every Office fan has their favourite character, season, moment and subplot – for me it’s Pam, Season 3′s stellar run, the CPR scene from the Stress Relief episode and the darkly weird Scranton Strangler thread from the latter half of the series – and a month into this new socially distanced world, it has been heartening to queue the show up, find little moments of small-screen bliss on-demand, and forget about the rest of the world for a moment.
But as horrible as this world is, it has also made the experience of consuming The Office especially curious. How else to describe watching a show that celebrates the everyday life of a life that doesn’t exist any more? Copy-machine frustrations, thermostat battles, kitchen-fridge passive-aggressiveness, Jello-encased staplers and the purgatory of conference-room meetings … oh, to long for those halcyon days of workplace nothingness. Watching The Office reworks the concept of modern nostalgia, where even the mundane can seem extraordinarily special.
As Greene’s book recounts, there have been occasional attempts to resurrect or reboot The Office, against (almost) everyone’s better judgment. Next month, Netflix will debut Daniels and Carell’s new sitcom collaboration, Space Force, which sounds a lot like The Office … but in space. And just last week, former NBC chief Ben Silverman and Office writer Lieberstein (who also played loathed HR rep Toby) announced that they were working on a comedy that would reflect our new working-remotely world. (If you thought Zoom meetings were the height of hilarity already….)
Yet, as I put on the Stress Relief episode again and perfect my recipe for Kevin’s homemade chili, I’m confident that the exact successful formula of The Office will never be repeated. Leaving aside the many international iterations of the show that have sprung up – including Israeli, Indian and even Québécois versions, ensuring a steady stream of income for Gervais and Merchant – there will never be anything else to come along with the exact right balance of deadpan comedy, corporate cynicism and full-blooded heart to fill the hole that The Office left behind. Or, in the words of Michael Scott: That’s what she said.
Ranking The Office characters
Given that the hard-ish-working men and women populating Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton, Pa., office were so fond of in-office games and time-wasters, it’s a wonder that Jim, Pam, Michael, Dwight and the rest never took a break from their paper-selling days to rank themselves. But that’s why Phillip Crawley pays me the big bucks. Presenting The Globe and Mail’s official not-to-be-disputed-absolutely-100-per-cent-accurate ranking of The Office characters.*
1. Michael Scott (played by Steve Carell) His mug says “World’s Best Boss,” and who are we to dispute such an enamel-certified fact? Michael started off the NBC series as a slimier version of Ricky Gervais’s BBC-bred fool, but over the course of seven seasons evolved into one of modern television’s most heartfelt, layered characters. Not quite the hero of his own story, but the everyman who we could all project upon our own lives of quiet despair. The fact that Michael eventually received his own happy ending meant there was hope for every one of us, no matter the degree to which we deluded ourselves with visions of managerial grandeur.
2. Pam Beesly (Jenna Fischer) The real hero of The Office, Pam was the one you always rooted for, who you always knew was going to come out the other end fiercer, funnier, stronger.
3. Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson) Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica. Those words may have been thrown in Dwight’s face as character-trait insults by Jim, but they’re pretty accurate. And awesome. May the patriarch of Schrute Farms live long and prosper (before you start: I know that’s not a Battlestar quote; nerd alert!).
4. Darryl Philbin (Craig Robinson) Underutilized for so many seasons, Robinson’s deadpan warehouse foreman – who never passed up an opportunity to make Michael look like an even bigger dunce than he was – finally got a chance to shine when he was promoted in Season 6.
5. Kelly Kapoor (Mindy Kaling) The human embodiment of E! Entertainment Television, Kelly brought a frantic comic energy to the office’s much-avoided annex. Poor Ryan. Poor Toby. But not poor ... us.
6. Toby Flenderson (Paul Lieberstein) The sad sack to end all sad sacks, Toby was a human Eeyore come to life. And we loved him for it. Even though I still think he was secretly the Scranton Strangler.
7. Erin Hannon (Ellie Kemper) The only person in the office to actually, sincerely admire Michael, dim-bulb Erin couldn’t help but win over hearts, if not minds, the minute she was introduced in Season 5.
8. Creed Bratton (Creed Bratton) There are singular characters on The Office. And then there is Creed – an acid-trip of a man who, if you made his biography up, no one would believe it.
9. Kevin Malone (Brian Baumgartner) If you ever listen to Baumgartner talk outside character, you’ll quickly realize how much work he put into making worst-accountant-ever Kevin such an imaginative creation of doltish tendencies and big-hearted goofiness.
10. Jim Halpert (John Krasinski) Is it unfair to place Jim so far down this list? Maybe, to devotees to the concept of Jam (that’d be Jim + Pam shippers). But, as was underlined again and again over the course of the series, Jim was kind of a … jerk. (Insert shoulder-shrug-to-the-camera look here.)
11. Ryan Howard (B.J. Novak) Speaking of jerks … well, at least Ryan sold his deficits early on, eventually embracing them fully when he moved up the corporate ladder and grew a Faustian goatee.
12. Karen Filippelli (Rashida Jones) Conceived as a worthy adversary to Pam, Karen turned into something more complicated and appreciated: a worthy friend and companion to Pam. For most of her time at Dunder Mifflin, anyway. More than a small part of me wishes Jim fled to Manhattan with Karen instead of sticking around Scranton, if only so Pam would find someone a bit less jerky than Halpert. But that’s fan-fiction for another column.
13. Stanley Hudson (Leslie David Baker) Every office has a crossword-obsessed, nap-prone, extraordinarily irritable Stanley Hudson. But only The Office had this Stanley Hudson.
14. Phyllis Vans (Phyllis Smith) I still get chills just thinking of Phyllis throwing the camera one of her dear-god-Michael-no looks. She was the master of the subtle art of nervy shade.
15. Andy Bernard (Ed Helms) Andy got short shrift later in the series when the writers decided he needed to be made manager in a post-Michael world … and then completely tossed the character adrift (literally, as he was sent on an indefinite sail around the world). Eventually Cornell’s favourite graduate was redeemed and we got the Andy who drove us crazy, in a good way, by the time the series came to a close.
16. Angela Martin (Angela Kinsey) Maybe this ranking should be higher, given she was every bit the well-shaded weirdo as eventual husband Dwight. And maybe I’m letting my severe cat allergy affect my decision-making. We’ll never know.
17. Oscar Martinez (Oscar Nunez) Wait … did I call Phyllis the master of subtle shade? I meant Oscar.
18. Gabe Lewis (Zach Woods) Gabe seemed less a fully formed character than a test-run for Zach Woods’s incredibly awkward work on HBO’s Silicon Valley. That said, he got a lot of mileage out of Gabe’s wonderfully creepy composure.
19. Nellie Bertram (Catherine Tate) Catherine Tate is a bigger star and more talented performer than Office mastermind Ricky Gervais back in Britain. But when the U.S. version of the show recruited her late in its run, her mean-spirited Nellie seemed like a wonderful idea that everyone immediately forgot about.
20. Meredith Palmer (Kate Flannery) Honestly, until a co-worker mentioned it, I had completely forgot that Meredith was part of the show. Maybe I was one too many drinks deep into my cocktail hour (which now starts whenever I dang well please) while writing this ... hey, just like Meredith was always drunk on the show! So let’s call this ranking all part of a grand inside joke.
21. Clark Green (Clark Duke) and Peter Miller (Jake Lacy) This one’s a tie, given that New Jim (Pete) and New Dwight (Clark) were slid in at the last minute in what appears to be a crass attempt to reboot the entire show’s cast. No fault to either men – the characters had their moments, especially when Pete started to woo Erin with his freakish knowledge of Die Hard – but there is a reason that the ninth season was the last.
23. Robert California (James Spader) The idea of Robert California makes sense, in a writers’ room kind of way. He’s mysterious, sexy, cool – a modern-day Don Draper played for chuckles. But because of Spader’s classical training, the gap still felt by the absence of Michael, and a general sense of overwhelming silliness by Season 8, the character never gelled. And in fact repelled.
(*Note: We’re only dealing with Dunder Mifflin employees who appeared in the upstairs main office for more than five episodes; sorry, warehouse workers, travelling salesmen, Dunder Mifflin corporate staff like Jan and David, and all members of the Stamford branch.)
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