What Killed the Original Spinoff to ‘The Office?'

The Paper, a spinoff from The Office, is here! And, from what I’ve heard, it’s pretty good. I haven’t heard that from everyone I know who’s watched it, but most. Regardless, it’s not going anywhere anytime soon, as Peacock has renewed it for another season. So, it’s already doing better than The Office, which had an inaugural season of six episodes and was almost cancelled.

It’s encouraging because this isn’t the first time that the camera crew that recorded Dunder Mifflin filmed Oscar Núñez in another environment. Núñez, who plays Oscar Martinez in both The Office and The Paper, was once part of a proposed spinoff that would see him make his way to Dwight Schrute’s beet farm. What he would do from there is anyone’s guess, because the show never made it past a backdoor pilot.

The ninth and final season of The Office contained 25 episodes. Right near the end, in episode 17, we were introduced to Dwight Schrute’s immediate family, who had been unmentioned until this point. There had likely been talk of Dwight having siblings, but the show finally introduced them and revealed that they were not nearly as odd as their uptight, beet-farming brother.

I think the episode is pretty funny, even if it retcons a host of things, and even attempts to cast off Dwight’s relationship with Angela, despite the fact that they would go on to get married eight episodes later. There’s a very decent chance I would have followed Dwight to another show at the time. However, the show was revealed not to be going forward before it even aired, and Dwight’s family was never seen again.

Why didn’t the show move forward? The Office was a big enough hit at the time that a spinoff seemed like a surefire bet. As Rainn Wilson, who played Dwight, puts it, NBC didn’t see it that way. Ever. “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,” Wilson recently explained on The Last Laugh podcast.

There could be other factors, but NBC not realizing that what they had was gold tracks. Wilson noted that it was often an issue at the network, until after the show was off the air. He said, “But 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.”

Well, all these years later, NBC finally has its The Office spinoff and, unlike real newspapers, it looks like it may have a future. Maybe someday it will find itself visiting a beet farm owned by the manager of a paper company. My guess is that, should that happen, Thomas Middleditch won’t be involved this time.