Brian Baumgartner, who played the endearingly dim-witted accountant Kevin Malone on NBC’s “The Office,” can’t escape the role that defined him for nine seasons.
He even recently appeared in an episode of the NBC drama “Suits LA,” playing himself. In the show, he asked his attorney to find a way to do away with the character so he could realize his dream of becoming an Oscar-worthy dramatic actor.
Loyal “Office” fans surely caught the inside gag.
In fact, Baumgartner has for years served as a happy ambassador for the beloved mockumentary about the employees of a Scranton, Penn., paper company. He hosted a podcast celebrating ”The Office” and turned it into a best-selling oral history book. Kevin Malone’s famous chili paved the way for two cookbooks.
Many hit shows from decades ago have been embraced by audiences thanks to exposure on Netflix and other streaming platforms. But even among that group, “The Office” — which is celebrating its 20th anniversary — lives in rare air.
While never a blockbuster hit during its initial run that began on March 24, 2005, streaming has helped turn “The Office,” an adaptation of the eponymous British series, into an enduring pop culture touchstone.
The familiar cast members have ridden the wave, evoking their famous roles in TV commercials for Cheerios, Panera Bread, Bush’s Beans, Fox’s telecast of the 2020 Super Bowl and AT&T Business. The show is being licensed for toys (Lego, Little People, Funko Pop! and Polly Pockets) and children’s books including “The Office: A Day at Dunder Mifflin Elementary.” Tickets for an annual unofficial fan convention known as the Reunion, to be held in New Jersey this year, go for as much as $400.
“The Office” continues to have a stylistic influence on TV comedy as well. Its faux-documentary style — reminiscent of Christopher Guest movies — became a template for other successful sitcoms including “Modern Family,” “Abbott Elementary” and most recently NBC’s “St. Denis Medical.”
While fans have been content to rewatch “The Office,” they will finally get a spin-off series from executive producer Greg Daniels. The still-to-be-named series, set at a Midwestern newspaper that depends on citizen journalists, will premiere this year on Peacock.
The series will take place in “The Office” universe with alum Oscar Nuñez joining the cast. (Daniels, protective of “The Office” canon, noted that Oscar Martinez was the only character who did not have a life-changing resolution in the finale).
Baumgartner has helped feed “The Office” popularity machine for years, but he’s still taken aback at how much the show means to fans who have discovered it since it ended.
“They have an intense need to tell me how the show helped them through a difficult time,” Baumgartner told The Times. “A medical condition, a family issue, a domestic problem. It’s a very powerful thing.”
Even with its cringe-generating moments, often created by Steve Carell’s malapropism-prone Michael Scott, the familial atmosphere of Dunder Mifflin is a welcome escape at a time of political division and angry social discourse.
“In this fractured society, just seeing and feeling a disparate group of people who care about each other is rare, particularly in TV right now,” Baumgartner said.
While streaming services entered bidding wars for “Friends,” “Seinfeld” and other hit sitcoms of the past, “The Office” quietly outperformed them. Nielsen data showed it was the most streamed show in 2020, a time when more consumers were turning to Netflix, where “The Office” was streaming, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
That demand translated into a big-money deal. Comcast Corp. shelled out $100 million to its own Universal Television unit that produced “The Office” to bring the series to its Peacock streaming service in 2021 — five times what Netflix was paying, according to people familiar with the deal who were not authorized to comment publicly.
The series is the most popular program on the service. NBC says the average Peacock viewer has watched 59 episodes of the series.
Peacock enlisted the show’s producers to create “super fan” episodes that restore material cut for its original 22 minute broadcast run-time (they are just getting to the ninth and final season). They have helped drive 1.7 billion hours of viewing of “The Office,” accounting for 7% of all Peacock usage.
“The Office” has also remained a staple of traditional TV, currently running on three cable networks: E!, Comedy Central and Freeform. With cable networks cutting back on original programming, “The Office” reruns are filling up hours of their schedules. The show airs on more than a dozen international broadcast services.
The durability of vintage TV sitcoms such as “I Love Lucy” and “Friends” are driven in part by the nostalgia of fans who grew up with them. But some audiences flocking to the “The Office” are discovering as if it were a new show.
As streaming video gained audience, Daniels heard from co-workers on his other projects about how their preteen kids were watching “The Office” obsessively on Netflix which first bought the rights in 2011. Being trapped in a cubicle and forced to deal with a buffoonish boss resonates with the junior high crowd.
”It’s like your experience in school, when the teacher is lecturing you and you’re unable to avoid it,” Daniels said. “Or the person at the desk next to you is someone you didn’t necessarily choose to be your best friend and you’re kind of stuck there.”
Jim Donnelly, executive vice president for comedy at Universal Television, said the show’s youthful appeal helps replenish the audience.
“I do think that as television viewers come of age, they are finding the show,” he said. “We haven’t really seen any drop-off in interest.”
Daniels says the show still fells contemporary after two decades. The British version of “The Office” — created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant — was shot with a Frederick Wiseman-like bleakness. But Daniels gave the U.S. edition the look of a reality show format, complete with confessional interviews. He hired the film crew from “Survivor” after “The Office” pilot was picked up.
The practical jokes on the show appeal to a younger generation that devours prank videos — from MrBeast to Dude Perfect — across YouTube and other social media platforms. The official TikTok account for “The Office” has 4.2 million followers, nearly 1 million more than “Friends.”
The enduring success of “The Office” is remarkable considering the show’s rocky start. “A single camera sitcom, shot as a faux documentary with no laugh track with people who look normal in the age of ‘Friends’ and ‘Baywatch,’ was not an easy pitch,” said Ben Silverman, who brought the program to NBC. (Silverman currently runs the production company Propagate.)
“The Office” was created in another era of television, when reaching broad audiences was necessary for network TV survival. The show was vying for a spot on the schedule at a time when NBC had lost its mega-hit “Friends” and had pinned its hopes on “Joey,” a spin-off featuring Matt LeBlanc that struggled to get through two seasons.
Jeff Zucker, who ran NBCUniversal at the time, admits the quirky comedy style of “The Office” pilot was not easy for his programming department to digest.
“The folks at NBC Entertainment at the time were probably not the target in understanding the humor of the show,” Zucker said in an interview.
“The Office” had one real champion in upper management at the network: Kevin Reilly, the entertainment president who first received a pitch for the project when he was running cable network FX.
Daniels didn’t have the prestige TV snobs behind him either. Creating a U.S. version of the acclaimed 2001 British series was perilous.
“There was a lot of stress because fans of the original show were saying ‘Why are you doing this? It’s such a gem,’ ” Daniels recalled. “I would say, ‘If you like this kind of comedy, this is the closest you’re going to get.’ ”
The pilot was not well-received by test audiences, but showed enough of a pulse with younger viewers to earn a six episode order — an unusually small number at the time for a network show.
Ratings declined after a decent audience for its premiere. Zucker said there were “long conversations” at the network before bringing the show back for a second year.
But the show caught a couple major breaks. One was Carell’s lead role in the summer box office hit “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” which turned him into a movie star and a draw for a show that avoided casting big name actors at the start.
The other was NBC’s decision to offer episodes on Apple’s iTunes platform when DVD sets were the main way to binge-watch. The move was a precursor to the video-on-demand streaming world.
While the “Office” audience was small by network TV standards of the time, many of its viewers were young, upscale and more willing to adapt to new technology. In 2005, “The Office” became a top seller on iTunes with 100,000 downloads in the first few months.
“I think that told us that there was going to be a new way of delivering these shows,” Zucker said. “Had ‘The Office’ started out on streaming, it would have been a huge hit right out of the box.”
Ash Tavassoli, executive vice president and creative director of ad agency BBDO LA never caught “The Office” during its network run. But when he was recovering from surgery he went down the series rabbit hole of 192 episodes.
“I’m like, ‘I can’t turn this thing off,’ ” Tavassoli said. “I had to immediately tell anyone who I knew who hadn’t watched it, ‘You need to go watch this thing.’ ”
The on-screen alchemy between the cast members inspired him to use them in an ad campaign for AT&T Business that started running last year.
“The Office” co-stars Baumgartner, Rainn Wilson, Jenna Fischer, Craig Robinson, Kate Flannery and Creed Bratton appear in the series of trippy commercials depicting the launch of a line of pillow speakers called Sleep with Rainn. Tavassoli said it didn’t take much to get the tight-knit group to make their own creative contributions to the spots.
“You put them on a set together and they have their own dynamic,” Tavassoli said. “When we shot with them, they didn’t even feel us on set. We let them cook for three days.”
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