Rainn Wilson Begs Everyone to Stop Watching ‘The Office’
The Office is a cozy comfort watch for a generation (or two) of viewers. But there’s a cost to that kind of popularity, warns Rainn Wilson, who played Dwight Shrute on the long-running sitcom.
“I was talking to this TV guy, and I was like, ‘Why are there no new great comedies?’” Wilson told Mark Normand and Sam Morril on the We Might Be Drunk podcast. “There’s so few TV comedies!”
After the usual discussion of how The Bear isn’t really a comedy and Hacks can be funny but depressing, Wilson offered his theory behind the dearth of hit sitcoms in the 2020s. “The problem is that people keep fucking watching The Office over and over again,” he complained. “And Seinfeld and Friends and 30 Rock and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.”
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The most chronic rewatchers and bingers are young people, Wilson noted, giving streamers and networks no incentive to create the next comfort sitcom. “So stop watching The Office!” Wilson demanded. “There’s your headline. Rainn Wilson says, ‘Stop watching The Office!’ Clickbait! Outrage!”
Normand laughed at Wilson’s tirade, but it also shed light on a fundamental change in the TV comedy business. “When All in the Family stopped coming on, you watched the next thing,” Normand realized. “Because you couldn’t replay All in the Family.”
Why would Wilson tell people to stop streaming The Office if it takes money out of his pocket? Maybe because he’s not making as much as you think. “I get pretty good residuals,” he said, “although it’s funny, I did not from Netflix.”
During the pandemic, The Office was a salve for the isolation blues — viewers spent 57 billion minutes watching the sitcom on Netflix during 2020 alone. “If you knew the check amount for the residual, it was very low for that,” Wilson explained.
Of course, there’s still Hulu, Peacock, Comedy Central and foreign sales, so don’t cry for the show’s cast. “We do okay,” Wilson said modestly, which translates to “We’re freaking rich beyond your wildest dreams.”
The COVID views propelled The Office into another stratosphere, popularity-wise. “People don’t remember this, but even before Steve (Carell) left, we were in ratings decline,” Wilson said. “The last four or five seasons.”
Even before that, he could never have predicted the billions of views. “We thought it was gonna be like Arrested Development,” he said. “Season and a half, two seasons. Cult following, great show, but disappears. I can’t even tell you how many times we were almost canceled.”
It’s easy to see why Wilson and company were worried. Even after the show was winning awards, it wasn’t drawing huge ratings. It scored an Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series in its second season, for example, but finished 67th in viewership.
The show’s current popularity is bad news for comedy scribes, who are struggling to find work in a post-Office world. “It’s got to be tough for these writers,” Normand said. “There used to be like 38 comedies on TV. Now there’s like two. They must be clawing to get those jobs.”
