10 years later, Dwight still regrets the aborted spin-off of The Office

Rainn Wilson should have been the star of The Farm, a derived series dedicated to Dwight Schrute. But NBC decided to cut short and the actor had trouble recovering.

The new The Office series, with Oscar Martinez back in accounting for The Paper, has just been launched. And that only reminds Rainn Wilson how his own spin-off was abruptly canceled.

The Farm had to focus history on Dwight Schrute and her strange family. After a clumsy pilot included in the middle of season 9 of The Office – a few hours before the end of the series – NBC decided to cut short and stop the project in full flight.

A decade later, Wilson still regrets this decision, due to the chain programming turn, but believes that The Farm could have been a real success.

Guest of the Podcast The Last Laugh, Rainn Wilson says:

“At the time, NBC (the American channel of The Office) wanted to redo large flashy shows, multi-cams in the spirit of Friends. And the leaders were absolutely not interested in spin-offs from The Office”.

Too bad, because according to him, The Farm could have reported big: “If they had ordered the series, as they should have, they would probably have $ 1 billion more to the bank today … all those who saw The Office 20 times would have watched it at least once or twice.”

The fact remains that the Farm pilot included in The Office had been widely criticized. But Wilson is convinced:

“Would it have been as good as The Office? No. Not at all. But would it have been solid, a good comedy, with really cool things? Yes! And I think they missed an opportunity.”

Wilson just that NBC “never really understood the power of The Office”, until its streaming arrived on Netflix, revealing its immense popularity. He also recognized that certain episodes were “astounding of clumsiness”, citing as an example the intrigue of “Benihana Christmas”. “It is a series centered on clumsy, insensitive, racist, sexist people, which in some way reflects the United States,” he said, before clarifying that a new version should be “very, very different” in the current context.