The Office writer Mike Schur opened up about how Saturday Night Live‘s Japanese parody of the NBC comedy didn’t sit super well with him.
The Man on the Inside creator stopped by The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast for its Criterion Episode to evaluate different Lonely Island digital shorts. While appearing on the show, Seth Meyers asked Schur and CNN anchor Jake Tapper what their thoughts were about the short, “The Japanese Office,” and both agreed it wasn’t one of the top ones.
“I worked at SNL, but you still feel like SNL at some point, at some level, is an arbiter of what matters in the culture,” he explained. “And when he did ‘The Japanese Office,’ I remember being a little bit rankled.” He added, “It didn’t feel right to me in some way. It didn’t like, I don’t know, it didn’t like scratch the itch of like reflecting the show in the way that I was hoping the show would be reflected somehow.”
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In the pre-recorded sketch, original Office creator Ricky Gervais introduced the clip from a Japanese TV show he claimed was what he based the British sitcom on. The fictional show saw Carell’s Michael, Jason Sudeikis’ Jim, Kristen Wiig’s Pam and Bill Hader’s Dwight taking on traits of their respective characters but entirely in Japanese. Gervais ended the sketch by saying, “It’s funny ’cause it’s racist.”
Schur went on to say he didn’t really understand the premise of the sketch, “because it’s like they stole the show for me, but I stole it from the Japanese version, but then all the actors in the Japanese version are white people. It sort of didn’t track to me somehow.”
However, The Good Place creator did acknowledge it was a big deal for The Office when Carell hosted the show, even though the sitcom had already been fairly well-established at the time.
“It was a very big deal that he hosted, a big deal that Rainn [Wilson, who plays Dwight Schute in the comedy] hosted,” Schur said. “I loved the first time when Rainn hosted, and you did the like parody of The Office with his monologue. I was like, they’re nailing this. Everyone’s nailing it.”
The sitcom ran for nine seasons from 2005 to 2013 and has gathered a cult following since hitting various streamers over the years, including Netflix and Peacock.
A spinoff set in the world of The Office is in the works at Peacock from creators Greg Daniels and Michael Koman but with a set of new characters. The show’s logline reads, “The documentary crew that immortalized Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton branch is in search of a new subject when they discover a historic Midwestern newspaper and the publisher trying to revive it.”
Domhnall Gleeson and Sabrina Impacciatore lead the cast of the spinoff, which also includes Melvin Gregg, Chelsea Frei, Ramona Young, Gbemisola Ikumelo, Alex Edelman, Tim Key and Eric Rahill.
