The Office Comes to Your Office

There are two things that suck about the summer: missing your favorite network TV shows, and having to sit in an office working on a beautiful day. For fans of NBC's The Office, both situations will get slightly better in summer 2006. The network is planning 10 online-only episodes of the sitcom, in which supporting characters from the Dunder-Mifflin accounting department will investigate a missing cache of money.

It's a good idea for two reasons. First, The Office has developed its peripheral characters almost as well as its main ones. We've learned over time that Oscar (Oscar Nunez) is gay but not out to his colleagues; that prissy Angela (Angela Kinsey) has a running affair with Dwight (Rainn Wilson); and quiet Meredith (Kate Flannery) is twice divorced, is an alcoholic and has had a hysterectomy. Perhaps partly because the show has hired strong comic actors (some of whom, like B. J. Novak and Mindy Kaling, are also writers), the producers and actors seem to have a full sense of who even the smallest character is. Like The Simpsons, The Office has a team so broad and strong that the bench can play first-string.

Second, it's a perfect match of audience and medium. The Office has proved itself to have an audience of early technology adapters. Since it became available on iTunes late last year, the show has become one of the most-downloaded series, selling well over a million episodes so far. When the Nielsen ratings started including viewers who watched shows later on digital video recorders like Tivo, its ratings jumped five percent.

When it premiered as a spinoff from the acclaimed British comedy, The Office took a chance that a painfully comic look at cubicle life would resonate with white-collar Americans. Now it's betting that those same Americans will turn to it for an excuse to escape their own work lives. Will it succeed? Ask yourself this: Are you reading this blog at work?