With a new spinoff of The Office available on Peacock, longtime fans are sure to be curious about what Dwight Schrute is up to these days.
Amid the premiere of The Paper, Rainn Wilson recently explained what happened with The Farm, the axed offshoot about his eccentric character from the NBC workplace comedy, which ran from 2005 to 2013 and earned him three Emmy nominations.
“NBC at that time had a new regime that came in and they wanted to do big, bright, flashy, splashy shows that were multi-cams and going back to Friends kind of thing. And they were just not interested at all in Office spinoffs at the time,” he said on The Last Laugh podcast. “Had they taken The Farm, they’d probably have another billion dollars in the bank. Even now, all the people that have seen The Office 20 times, they’re going to watch The Farm at least once or twice. Would it have been as good as The Office? No. No way. Not even close. Would it have been good? Would it have been solid? Would it have been a good solid comedy? Yeah, it would have, and we would’ve done some really cool stuff. And I think they really missed out.”
Wilson continued, “But the the history of The Office in NBC is, they never really got the show. Honestly, it was like five years after the show was over, when all of a sudden it started being watched in the billions of minutes on Netflix, that NBC was like, wait a minute, this is kind of a cash cow. This is actually a really good show and it’s got some legs.”
Although The Farm was set up in a backdoor episode of the ninth and final season of The Office, Wilson confirmed in a 2012 tweet that the spinoff was not moving forward, before the episode had even aired.
Elsewhere in the podcast, Wilson admitted that elements of the sitcom were “jaw-droppingly kind of horrific,” explaining it was “a show based around clueless, insensitive, racist, sexist people that kind of mirrors the United States in a lot of ways.
“You want to encourage it, because it’s funny as hell and it also kind of skewers a particular American sensibility,” added Wilson. “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.”
Wilson played Dunder Mifflin salesman and assistant manager Dwight Schrute for the entirety of the show’s nine-season run.
In series creator Greg Daniels‘ new Peacock spin-off The Paper, the same documentary crew follows Domhnall Gleeson as the eager publisher of The Truth Teller, a struggling Toledo, Ohio newspaper, which he tries to revive with the help of volunteer reporters.
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