The Office is not just any TV sitcom. It has been nominated for nine Emmys, and won the outstanding comedy series award in 2006. Its cast scored back-to-back Screen Actors Guild awards for ensemble performance, in 2007 and 2008.
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The Office breaks ground on its sixth season tonight. At this rate, the mockumentary that began as a film-within-a-film in 2005 might never end. Unlike the Ricky Gervais original, which ran for just 12 episodes in Britain in 2001, followed by a couple of Christmas specials, the U.S. version has kept on going. The fictional documentary about the lives of the office employees at Dunder Mifflin is beginning to take on the dimensions of a Ken Burns epic.
Carell, for one, has found no end to plumbing the shallow depths of his character, Michael.
"I just model it after my own shallow self," Carell said.
Carell says his character, Michael, has changed.
"Michael (Carell's character) was more of an antagonist in the first season," Daniels says. "Later, he became a person you root for, so you had to root for somebody with less hair gel."
"I've always seen him as a sympathetic character," Carell continued. "There are shades of grey to everybody, even people who are obnoxious and unlikable to your face. I always felt he was a guy whose intentions were good, whose heart was in the right place. But he has a social disconnect, an emotional blind spot."
The tone of The Office has changed over the seasons, too, Carell added, because of the fictional conceit of having a documentary film crew capture their every move.
After five seasons, The Office's most unexpected impact on popular culture may be in the way it has eclipsed the British original -- something that seemed unthinkable at the time. "I was in London this past summer, and I was stopped by a lot of people," Fischer said. "I had been in London about three years ago, and I totally flew under the radar. Nobody recognized me. Something has definitely happened in the past few years, because this time, when I was there, I was stopped almost everywhere I went, even while visiting museums."
