Rainn Wilson Says The Office Would Need a Radical Rewrite to Work Today, Calls Jokes “Horrific” and Insensitive

Oh great, the grudge match you didn’t see coming: Rainn Wilson and The Office trench warfare over the show’s wilder, more reckless jokes. I’m Kai Montgomery, your grumpy guru who will grumble through the receipts and spill the tea anyway. If you thought the iconic NBC workplace was all harmless banter and paper quotas, buckle up, because Wilson just delivered a blunt assessment about how the show would land in 2025.

In a chat on The Last Laugh podcast, Wilson reopened a chapter most fans would rather shelve: the Benihana Christmas episode. He points to a moment where Michael Scott and Andy, at a Christmas party, draw on an Asian woman with a Sharpie, a moment he calls jaw-droppingly horrific. The star who played Dwight Schrute doesn’t mince words about the show’s landscape: the ensemble is “clueless and in their cluelessness they’re racist and insensitive,” with Michael, Dwight, and Andy – and yes, Kevin too – represented as people navigating a country still riddled with bias. That admission frames The Office not as a flawless workplace satire but as a mirror of American sensibilities at their messiest, most awkward height.

Wilson’s verdict on today’s TV climate is pragmatic if not wistful: the show “would need to be very, very different” if it landed in 2025. He doesn’t pretend the groundbreaking nature of the early seasons excuses the missteps of the past; instead, he acknowledges the line between being funny and crossing into harm. He says the intention to “encourage it” existed because the humor sometimes skewered a particular American sensibility, but the depth of offense is hard to overlook once you dig deeper. It’s not a blanket condemnation of the show’s era; it’s a careful calibration of how far comedy has shifted and what type of risk a modern reboot could—or should—take.

The conversation isn’t entirely doom and gloom. Wilson admits there’s a legitimate, almost irresistible pull to the humor that once felt both funny and pointed. The tricky line, he explains, lies in balancing satire with sensitivity, in keeping the savage edge of the show’s bravado while avoiding reductive stereotypes that land as merely gratuitous. This is not merely nostalgia talking; it’s a reckoning about what it means to critique a culture through a lens that might be painful to those being lampooned. The Office has persisted in popularity, and its spin-off The Paper just premiered on Peacock, with Oscar Nunez confirming Wilson’s finger on the pulse as a signal that old colleagues haven’t vanished from the conversation entirely.

The wider conversation touches on the show’s legacy beyond the original cast. Nunez reveals Wilson was among the first to sniff out a spinoff whisper and notes that Wilson has long had the “finger on the pulse” of new developments in the Office universe. The backstory about a Dwight-centered spin-off, The Farm, and NBC’s regime changes in the mid-2000s adds texture: the network’s pivot toward bright, multi-camera comedies reminiscent of Friends suggests a different path could have produced a different legacy altogether. As Wilson notes, the dynamics would likely have produced something solid, though not as iconic as The Office itself. The point remains clear: what worked then may require a different recipe to resonate now.

So yes, the Office’s archival jokes still provoke. The question now isn’t just about whether the humor was edgy, but whether such jokes could survive the contemporary spotlight without tipping into harmful stereotypes. The answer, Wilson implies, is a tough yes if framed with care and updated sensibilities. The show would need to evolve in structure, tone, and context to survive the current cultural climate. What to watch next? Keep an eye on how Peacock and the broader Office universe navigate these conversations, especially as new projects land and old debates resurface. The next chapter could redefine comfort with humor or spark a renewed defense of comedy’s messy past.

Sources: Celebrity Storm and New York Post
Attribution: Rainn Wilson, James Gunn and Elliot Page at SXSW — Andre Manoel (CC BY-SA 2.0) (OV)