Being one of the most beloved characters on The Office, Rainn Wilson‘s Dwight Schrute had a lot of screen time throughout the sitcom’s nine-season run, but it still was not nearly as much as the audience would have wanted to see him. His eccentric behavior and unique personality provided plenty of comedic moments, and earned him three consecutive Emmy nominations for Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. However, at one time, he was set for a promotion to main star, leading his own spin-off series centered around his quirky character, which Wilson believes would have made a “billion dollars,” but NBC passed on the idea.
Wilson reflected on The Office offshoot that never came to fruition during a recent appearance on Daily Beast‘s The Last Laugh Podcast. The actor provided some insight into why NBC opted against pursuing the Dwight-centric show, titled The Farm, and asserted that the network “really missed out” by making that decision. The series, which would have followed the escapades of Dwight running a bed and breakfast and beet farm, was set up via a backdoor pilot in the final season of the Steve Carell-led comedy, but it didn’t go any further than that. The reason, according to Wilson, was that the network decided to change course.
“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. 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 suggested NBC failed to realize The Office‘s value until it became a cultural phenomenon. “The history of The Office in NBC is, they never really got the show,” he said. “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.”
‘The Office’ Finds a New Spiritual Successor in ‘The Paper’
The Farm might never have happened, but The Office has found a spiritual successor with the new Peacock mockumentary series The Paper, which sees the same unseen documentary crew that immortalized Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton branch now following the struggles of the historic but declining Toledo Truth-Teller newspaper in the digital age. Domhnall Gleeson leads the cast as the paper’s editor-in-chief alongside Sabrina Impacciatore, Chelsea Frei, Melvin Gregg, Gbemisola Ikumelo, Alex Edelman, Ramona Young, Tim Key, and Oscar Nunez, reprising his fan-favorite role from the original series, providing a link to the past.
Despite some reservations from fans of the original about whether The Paper would be able to replicate the success of The Office, Peacock gave the series a strong vote of confidence by renewing it for a second season, one day before the series premiered on the streaming service, giving co-creators Greg Daniels and Michael Koman the greenlight to move forward with more episodes – much to the delight of viewers. The show has been positively received, leading to an 85% critics’ score and 75% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The consensus notes that it “gets off to a promising start, establishing amusing dynamics and a genuine conviction for journalism that make for a potentially worthy successor to The Office.”
