The Office (US) in 2026: Cast, Best Episodes, Where to Watch & The Paper Spinoff Explained

A sitcom about a paper company went off the air in May 2013. More than a decade later, people still quote it in job interviews and stream it in numbers that embarrass shows released last month. In 2020, Americans watched 57 billion minutes of The Office, more than any other series that year. Nothing about that sentence is normal.

This guide tells the whole story in order: how the show nearly died in its first season, the cast that rescued it, which seasons deserve your time, the episodes fans replay endlessly, where to stream all 201 episodes in 2026, and what the new spinoff The Paper adds to the Dunder Mifflin universe. Each section sets up the one after it, so read it as a journey rather than a list.

What Is The Office? The Show That Almost Got Cancelled

The Office is an American mockumentary sitcom that aired on NBC from March 24, 2005 to May 16, 2013. It ran for nine seasons and 201 episodes. The setup is simple: a documentary crew films the staff of the Scranton, Pennsylvania branch of Dunder Mifflin, a mid-sized paper company losing ground to big-box chains and the internet. There is no laugh track and no studio audience. Characters give one-on-one interviews straight to the camera, and the biggest laughs often live in a glance rather than a punchline.

Greg Daniels adapted the format from the British original created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. The American pilot was a near line-for-line remake of the UK premiere, and critics noticed. The Washington Post compared it to a photocopy from a machine about to give out. USA Today called it a passable imitation of a better original. After a strong premiere night behind The Apprentice, the audience dropped by nearly half the following week.

Season 2 changed everything. The writers made Michael Scott warmer and better at his actual job, brightened the office lighting to separate the look from the gloomy UK version, and began writing to the strengths of their own actors instead of imitating Gervais. Outside the studio, Steve Carell's film The 40-Year-Old Virgin became a summer hit and iTunes began selling episodes, pulling in a young audience NBC could not reach on its own. The show that nearly died in year one went on to win the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series in 2006, a Peabody Award, a Golden Globe for Carell, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards for its ensemble.

That ensemble is the engine of the entire series, so the cast deserves its own section.

The Cast: Meet Dunder Mifflin Scranton

The Core Four

Michael Scott (Steve Carell). Regional manager and owner of a World's Best Boss mug he bought for himself. Michael is oblivious, needy, tactless and accidentally offensive, yet the writers kept revealing the lonely kid underneath, which is why his exit in season 7 lands like a family goodbye.

Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson). Top salesman, beet farmer, survivalist and self-appointed Assistant Regional Manager, a title Michael keeps correcting to Assistant to the Regional Manager. Dwight begins as a cartoon and ends as one of the most fully developed characters on the show.

Jim Halpert (John Krasinski). The salesman who fights boredom by pranking Dwight and looking into the camera like it is the only sane person in the room. His slow-burn romance with the receptionist powers the first three seasons.

Pam Beesly (Jenna Fischer). The shy receptionist engaged to a warehouse worker who takes her for granted. Her growth from silent bystander into a woman who walks across hot coals and asks for what she wants is the quiet backbone of the series.

The Supporting Ensemble

Around them sits one of the deepest benches in sitcom history. Andy Bernard (Ed Helms) is a Cornell graduate with anger issues and an a cappella habit. Kevin Malone (Brian Baumgartner) is an accountant remembered for a pot of chili he never got to serve. Angela Martin (Angela Kinsey) judges everyone while secretly dating Dwight; Oscar Martinez (Oscar Nunez) corrects everyone. Stanley Hudson (Leslie David Baker) does crosswords and counts the hours to retirement. Creed Bratton plays a stranger version of himself with an implied criminal past. Kelly Kapoor (Mindy Kaling) treats the annex like a reality show, Toby Flenderson (Paul Lieberstein) absorbs Michael's hatred with a sigh, Erin Hannon (Ellie Kemper) brings sunshine to reception in the later years, Ryan Howard (B.J. Novak) rises from temp to executive to fraud arrest, and Darryl Philbin (Craig Robinson) keeps the warehouse honest. Kaling and Novak pulled double duty as staff writers, as did Lieberstein, and Kaling wrote 24 episodes, more than anyone else on the team.

Casting Stories Fans Still Talk About

•     NBC's first suggestion for Michael Scott was Paul Giamatti, who turned the role down.

•     Rainn Wilson auditioned for Michael first and later called his take a terrible Ricky Gervais impersonation. The casting team moved him to Dwight instead.

•     Seth Rogen and Patton Oswalt both read for Dwight.

•     John Krasinski had privately set a deadline to quit acting if nothing happened for him. He booked Jim three weeks later.

•     Adam Scott and John Cho auditioned for Jim, and Kathryn Hahn read for Pam.

•     Phyllis Smith was a casting associate helping other actors with their auditions. The pilot's director liked her line readings so much that he wrote her into the show as Phyllis.

Characters this rich needed time to grow, and the show's quality rose and dipped in waves across nine years. The next section maps those waves so you know exactly where to start and what to skip.

Every Season Ranked: A Field Guide

Critics broadly agree with this shape. Seasons 2 and 3 hold perfect 100 percent scores on Rotten Tomatoes, and so does season 5. Season 8 sits at 44 percent, the only rotten rating of the run, and reviewers at the time blamed the drift that followed Carell's exit. The final season won most of them back, and the finale drew 5.7 million viewers plus widespread critical praise.

A season ranking shows you where the good stretches are. Individual episodes explain why fans never leave, and the ten below come up in every discussion.

The 10 Episodes Fans Never Stop Rewatching

1.     Stress Relief (season 5). Aired after Super Bowl XLIII to 22.9 million viewers, the biggest audience in show history. The opening fire drill might be the funniest cold open ever filmed.

2.     Dinner Party (season 4). Michael and Jan host Jim and Pam for the most uncomfortable evening on television. A masterclass in cringe.

3.     Casino Night (season 2). The season finale where Jim finally says what he feels. The kiss that launched a thousand rewatches.

4.     The Dundies (season 2). Michael's annual awards night at Chili's, and the moment Pam begs him to keep going. The episode where the show becomes itself.

5.     Niagara (season 6). The wedding fans waited five years for, complete with a dance down the aisle.

6.     Goodbye, Michael (season 7). Carell's farewell. The final lunch and the airport goodbye earn every tear.

7.     The Injury (season 2). Michael grills his foot on a George Foreman grill and demands sympathy. Pure chaos from the first minute.

8.     Beach Games (season 3). Office olympics on a lakeshore, ending with Pam's firewalk speech.

9.     Threat Level Midnight (season 7). The office finally watches Michael's homemade action movie, eleven years in the making.

10. Finale (season 9). One year after the documentary airs, everyone returns for a wedding. The closing interviews say more about work and meaning than most dramas manage.

Episodes like these explain the affection. They do not fully explain the numbers. For that, look at what happened after the show ended.

Why a Show That Ended in 2013 Rules 2026

The Office did well on NBC, peaking around nine million weekly viewers in season 5, but streaming turned it into a phenomenon. Netflix subscribers made it the platform's most watched title for years, and in 2020 the series logged 57 billion minutes of viewing in the United States, more than anything else on any service. NBCUniversal noticed and pulled the series back for its own platform, a move covered in the next section.

Memes did their part. Michael screaming "No, God, please, no" at Toby's return and Pam's "they're the same picture" corporate prank circulate daily on social platforms, introducing the show to viewers who were toddlers when it aired. The mockumentary style also ages unusually well. The talking-head format now reads like vlogs and creator content, so a show shot in 2005 feels native to an audience raised on front-facing cameras.

The fandom keeps feeding itself. Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey launched the Office Ladies podcast in 2019 and are rewatching the series episode by episode with behind-the-scenes stories. Brian Baumgartner runs his own interview podcast about the show. Scranton, a real city once defined by coal and rail, hangs Dunder Mifflin banners outside City Hall and hosted a fan convention as far back as 2007. An unofficial parody musical played New York for years.

All those rewatches need somewhere to happen, and where that is changed completely at the end of 2020.

Where to Watch The Office in 2026

In the United States, Peacock is the exclusive streaming home. NBCUniversal pulled the series off Netflix on December 31, 2020 and moved it to its own service the next day. Peacock carries all nine seasons plus extended "superfan" episodes with deleted scenes and extra footage unavailable anywhere else. Greg Daniels considers deleted scenes canon, so those extended cuts are the fullest version of the story that exists.

Outside the US, rights differ by country, and several regions still stream the show on Netflix or on local platforms. A free rights checker like JustWatch shows the current options for your location in seconds. If you want a permanent copy, the complete series arrived on Blu-ray in November 2020, and cable reruns continue on channels such as Comedy Central.

Peacock matters for one more reason. It is where the Dunder Mifflin universe quietly reopened.

The Paper: The Office Universe Returns

In September 2025, Peacock released The Paper, a mockumentary comedy from Greg Daniels and Michael Koman, co-creator of Nathan for You. The hook is elegant: the same documentary crew that filmed Dunder Mifflin for nine years finds a new subject, a historic local newspaper in Toledo, Ohio called the Truth Teller. Domhnall Gleeson stars as Ned Sampson, an idealistic new editor-in-chief trying to revive the dying paper with a skeleton staff and volunteer reporters.

One familiar face made the jump. Oscar Nunez returns as accountant Oscar Martinez, now keeping the books in Toledo. Steve Carell confirmed he will not appear. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, creators of the original British series, are attached as executive producers, and Office veterans such as director Ken Kwapis and writer-actor Paul Lieberstein worked on the first season.

Peacock originally planned a weekly rollout, then dropped all ten episodes at once on September 4, 2025 after strong early reactions. Reviews were warmer than most spinoffs ever receive. The Hollywood Reporter argued that the first season was stronger than the debut seasons of either The Office itself or Parks and Recreation. For fans of the original, it is the first new canon in this universe since the finale, and the fun facts below show how deep that universe already runs..

Facts That Surprise Even Longtime Fans

•     The cast voted on the theme song, and most wanted Mr. Blue Sky by Electric Light Orchestra. Another NBC drama had already claimed it, so composer Jay Ferguson wrote the piano theme, performed by a band credited as The Scrantones.

•     John Krasinski shot the real Scranton footage in the opening credits himself. He drove there to research the role and interviewed employees at actual paper companies.

•     Steve Carell had watched only about half of one episode of the British series before auditioning, then stopped on purpose so he would not copy Gervais.

•     The set was built with immovable walls, unusual for television, to trap the camera operators in the same airless space as the characters.

•     Carell earned 175,000 dollars per episode from season 3 onward, while Krasinski and Fischer started near 20,000 and reached six figures by season 4.

•     Senator John McCain joked on The Daily Show that he might pick Dwight Schrute as his running mate. Rainn Wilson accepted on Dwight's behalf on The Tonight Show.

•     After Michael moved to Colorado on the show, the state's real governor issued a press release appointing Michael Scott director of paper distribution in the Department of Natural Resources.

•     TripAdvisor built a real review page for Schrute Farms, the fictional bed and breakfast from season 4, and it collected hundreds of user reviews.

•     The actors improvised so much extra material that nearly every episode has deleted scenes, which is exactly why the Peacock superfan cuts discussed in the streaming section exist. Daniels treats every one of those scenes as part of the official story, meaning the documentary about Dunder Mifflin is still, in a sense, longer than anyone has fully seen.

The Bottom Line

The Office earned its afterlife. A show this rewatched is no accident of nostalgia; it is what happens when nine seasons of character work meet a format that aged into the social media era instead of out of it.

If you have never watched it, start with season 2 and circle back to the first six episodes later. If you drifted away after Michael left, the final season and its finale deserve a second chance, and the Peacock superfan cuts give even veteran fans scenes they have never seen. And if you finish all 201 episodes and want more, The Paper is waiting in the same universe with the same camera crew.

Scranton's most famous branch closed in 2013. The documentary never stopped mattering.