Since I can remember, The Office has been one of my all-time favorite television series. The characters are to die for, with their perfect personalities. My comfort zone is the office. I watch The Office whenever I’m feeling sad or just need a joke to lift my spirits. When The Office initially debuted, a lot of people had doubts, and this is why.

Nobody anticipated there would be another season of The Office when its six-episode debut on NBC in 2005 came to an end.

Poor ratings were received. The Office ranked 102 in terms of overall viewers out of the 156 series on broadcast networks during the TV season. Despite a very large 11.2 million viewers upon its debut, 57 percent had lost interest by the finale.

When he was interviewed on a podcast in 2018, Michael Schur, a writer on that first season who later went on to produce several highly successful TV shows of his own, captured the sense of approaching doom well.

“When we were filming the final episode, there was a scene where the cast was huddled together outside and everyone was feeling downhearted because it was our final week of filming. Everyone had a sense that this couldn’t possibly succeed, even though the show wouldn’t premiere for months, he recalled.

You are likely aware of what transpired afterwards. By relying on the track record of The Office creator Greg Daniels (of The Simpsons and King of the Hill fame) and on Steve Carell being a legitimate movie star in the then-upcoming The 40-Year-Old Virgin, NBC unexpectedly renewed The Office. Both wagers were successful. The Office experienced an unlikely turnaround in its second season, turning into a genuine cult and critical success that year, earning the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series. By the end of its sixth season, it had become the 11th-biggest TV program among younger viewers, simply a hit.

The Office has somehow maintained its stature since it was cancelled in 2013, helped along by Netflix, where the scant information available shows that it is a huge hit. When NBCUniversal revealed that The Office would be removed from the service in 2021, Twitter crashed. (As of July 15, it is also accessible on NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service, which will serve as the show’s exclusive home until it departs Netflix.)

On Etsy, you may find Office crafts. Office merchandise is available at Hot Topic and on Amazon. In one of the songs on her Grammy-winning 2019 album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go, pop sensation Billie Eilish—a teenager!—samples the program. The cast of the program came together twice for absurd YouTube talk shows hosted by Jim’s actor John Krasinski during the Covid-19-related worldwide quarantine. Anyone who has ever had to say “NOOOOOOO” in a GIF will attest to the show’s continued existence as a component of the internet’s lingo.

But why is the question. Think of Friends (with its candy-colored New York City full of attractive, or The Simpsons (set in an animated universe), which both have an element of escapism about them. The Office feels a bit miserable and gloomy, like a week of Mondays has swallowed everything whole. It takes place in a setting where wearing a tie to work, driving to a drab office park each day, and pulling practical jokes on coworkers constitute the height of fun. The show exhibits a social realism that is generally absent from more mainstream ideas about the significance of “meaningful” employment.

Even the setting of the series—a little city in the middle of the country named Scranton, Pennsylvania—is eerily reminiscent of the kind of place that has been wrecked by recession and business downsizing in the twenty-first century.

The Office is hardly the program you’d anticipate to appeal to a wide audience for all of these reasons and more. (Really, the only similarly themed comedy to enjoy such a resounding success is Cheers, and at least that one was set in an area where everyone knows your name.) But what makes The Office remarkable is not just how adored it is, but also how everyone seems to enjoy it. It appeals to teenagers who will almost certainly never work for a paper company.