Mike Schur

I mean, the Office US pilot was, by some measures, the lowest testing pilot in the history of the National Broadcasting Corporation.

Now, Greg Daniels, who adapted the show, had told NBC, this is such a revolutionary thing.

It's completely different from...

you know, Will and Grace and Friends and Seinfeld and you, it's not, no one's going to like this.

You just have to be prepared for that.

Now, some of that was just him being smart and sort of prophylactically defending his work, but he was 100% right.

And it's not like The Office was the first single, what's called single camera comedy where it's shot sort of cinematically where there's no studio audience and you're not in a proscenium set with like, you know, think of the Friends coffee house, right?

Where like one of the walls is missing because that's where the audience is and they laugh at all the jokes.

There had been other single-camera shows before this, certainly, but The Office had a double layer between the audience, which is that there was no laugh track, and also the actors were aware of the cameras.

It was, for the time, extremely experimental.

And no one liked it.

If you go back and watch, read the reviews, they're very fun to read.

Everyone hates it.

This is terrible.

It's so boring.

It's obnoxious.

But...

What Greg said was we have to retrain the audience to understand this visual language and this comedic language.

Thanks to the comedic genius of Steve Carell and John Krasinski and Rainn Wilson and Jenna Fisher and all of the people on the show, the show managed to break through and obviously became what it became.

Those sorts of moments in TV history are very difficult to get through because people don't like being retrained.