The Office Should Have Ended When Steve Carell Left
Business means money, there's no doubt about that, but when it comes to the film industry, you can't just focus on making a profit to the detriment of the quality of your content.
It is a burning issue.
How many successful TV shows that got off to a great start have ended up being total failures because executives failed to stop when they needed to stop?
NBC's The Office may not be the best example, but it clearly shows that sometimes you just have to stop.
The show stars Steve Carell as Michael Scott, the somewhat questionable boss of a branch of the fictional Dunder Mifflin paper company. The show is built around his character, so when he left the NBC sitcom in Season 7, it would have been logical to end it. Instead, the show was renewed for two more seasons, which were criticized for noticeably lower quality.
Why Steve Carell left the show is shrouded in mystery. While the World's Best Boss actor said in a 2011 interview with Entertainment Weekly that it "was a good time to move on" and "to spend more time with his family," the 2020 book The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s has revealed he was pushed to exit because NBC executives did not explicitly want him to stay.
It was a transition period for NBC and the new boss was not a big fan of The Office. This is crucial to understanding why the show's quality declined after Carell left. You can't let the main character go and continue with the project you don't like enough.
"Once Michael Scott [left The Office], it [had] to become something different," television critic Emily VanDerWerff said on The Oral History of The Office podcast. "It never quite figured out how to become different in an interesting way. It's a tricky thing to do when you have to replace the center of a show," she said adding that neither The Office nor any other show has ever managed to do that.
Many threads on Reddit argue that the show became unwatchable after Steve Carell left because it was "Michael Scott's brand of cringe" that held the show together.
Although some fans say the departure opened up space for new characters like Robert California and Nellie, who are pretty good, the show has evolved into something completely different.
"The post-Carell Office is a show all its own. And if you can manage not to compare the two, it is quite enjoyable," says one of the comments.
But to avoid that, The Office should have ended when Carell decided to leave.