The Office, III

Today's the 20th anniversary of the debut of The Office, and the internet for some reason is fucking obsessed about wondering if it would be allowed to be made today. Do any search for the show and half of the articles are on that subject, which is fucking tiresome. Stephen Merchant on the oft-asked question if it could be made today:

“I suppose it’s hard to say whether the show would be the same if we did it today,” Merchant says. “There’s part of me that wonders, would it get made, would it get commissioned in the same way now, or would people be too jumpy? I don’t know. Maybe we would’ve approached it differently. I think it’s hard to say.

“I think certainly, woke culture, or whatever you want to call it, is right to bring up things, joke areas or approaches to humour, or storytelling, or whatever that perhaps in the past would’ve been taken as read that you could do. And perhaps we should sort of stop and give it some thought,” he says.

“But the flip of that is that nothing we ever did was without careful consideration,” Merchant adds. “We never put a joke in there thoughtlessly. Everything was considered, at least in terms of, as we could see it through our eyes, what would be offensive and what wasn’t. And we always talked about being able to defend the jokes in the show and the subject matter.”

I spend less time wondering "would such & such show get made today?" and more time just being grateful it was made. Who the fuck cares if it would be made today?