The Office would now be “too hard” to make due its “politically incorrect” humor, Dwight Schrute actor Rainn Wilson has said.
Speaking to Fox News, Wilson claimed the cultural climate had moved on since The Office’s debut in 2005, and that some of its “really inappropriate” scenes would no longer fly.
“I do feel like you couldn’t make The Office today,” said Wilson. “I think that would be too hard to be as politically incorrect as the show was. And I do kind of miss that.”
Much of The Office’s humor was derived from the outrageous behaviour of Wilson’s character Dwight and Steve Carell’s legendary boss Michael Scott, who Wilson said was deliberately portrayed as lacking “self-awareness” and as a general “boob.” This allowed the show to feature their antics while simultaneously shining a light on their inappropriateness — typically signalled by eyerolling reactions from John Krasinski’s Jim.
“We milked that for a lot of great, really inappropriate stuff,” Wilson continued. “But even with the fact that painting [Michael] as just an idiot, I don’t think you could get away with it today.”
This isn’t the first time that Wilson has reflected on plotlines from The Office and suggested they now felt problematic, after he admitted cringing while rewatching the series’ third season episode “A Benihana Christmas” — which he said highlighted Michael, Dwight, and other characters as “clueless, insensitive, racist, sexist people that kind of mirrors the United States in a lot of ways.”
The episode is question sees Michael invite Asian American waitresses back to an office Christmas party, where he marks one of the women with a Sharpie pen — with the joke being that this is necessary for him to tell the difference between them.
“It’s a tricky conversation,” Wilson said previously. “It’s like they’re clueless, and in their cluelessness, they’re racist and insensitive, and they’re always saying the wrong thing.”
Fellow The Office actors Jenna Fischer and Angela Kingsley, who played Pam and Angela, previously stated on their podcast The Office Ladies that “the storyline would [not] have been written today.”
The Office ended in 2013 after a hugely-successful nine seasons on NBC. Its spinoff, The Paper, has been renewed for a second run.
Image credit: Paul Drinkwater/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social