There’s some genuine conversation out there as to whether or not The Office could get made in 2025. Sure, The Paper could, but could some of the humor within the walls of Dunder Mifflin fly today?
Rainn Wilson – who played Dwight Fart Schrute on The Office – recently chimed in on the topic, particularly citing one of the show’s funniest Christmas episodes – and no, it has nothing to do with waitresses all looking alike. “Listen you know, the ‘Benihana Christmas’ episode where Michael and Andy draw with a Sharpie on one of the Asian women that they’ve brought back to the Christmas party is jaw-droppingly, kind of horrific. And it’s a tricky conversation. It’s like they’re clueless, and in their cluelessness, they’re racist and insensitive, and they’re always saying the wrong thing. And that’s Michael, Dwight, and Andy — and Kevin for that matter. So it’s a show based around clueless, insensitive, racist, sexist people that kind of mirrors the United States in a lot of ways.”
Yet, The Office remains one of the most-watched shows on its streaming home, Peacock, at least partly because of just how over-the-top some of its central characters – chiefly, yes, Steve Carrell’s Michael Scott – get in their sheer ignorance over race and gender. Remember the two-fer he inadvertently hit Oscar with when Holly returned? Yeah, he should have been socked in the jaw in front of the receptionist’s desk.
Wilson continued, “You want to encourage it, because it’s funny as hell, and it also kind of skewers a particular American sensibility. But it definitely goes pretty far if you dig deep. Could it happen today? I think it would have to be very, very different if it were made in this environment…I think you’d need to set it up a little bit more, like All in the Family, where you’ve got someone who has really wrongheaded ideas and they are showcased in a certain way that make it very clear that this person is off base and clinging to ideas from the past. You’d just have to do more underlining of that if you were to make The Office in this present environment.”
Do you think some of the humor on The Office falls flat more than a decade after going off the air? Or are people too sensitive?
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